

Booklets

by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan 

Inspired by the Teaching of
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan





Toward the One,
The Perfection of Love, Harmony and Beauty,
The Only Being,
United with All the Illuminated Souls
Who Form the Embodiment of the Mster,
The Spirit of Guidance
 


Copyright (c) 1997  Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
All rights reserved

Published By
The Sufi Order International
North American Secretariat
P.O. Box 30065
Seattle, Washington, 98103

206-525-6992 (phone)
206-525-7013 (fax)
sufioffice@aol.com (e-mail)
sufioffice@compuserve.com (e-mail)


Consciousness and the Planes

Copyright (c) 1997  Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

First Edition, August 1995
Second Edition, July 1997 

The material included in this publication originally appeared as Keeping in Touch issue numbers 86 through 93.  Chapter One was issue 95. Photographs of Pir Vilayat and Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan are previously unpublished.

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 



Page 1



Introduction

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
This volume constitutes a study of the steps earmarked in the teachings of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan and the Sufi mystics of the past, including the teachings of various traditional esoteric schools, that lead to awakening in life. Each step 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, there is a corresponding mode of thinking or realization. As we shift our sense of identity from one level to the next, we awaken from one perspective to a further realization, following this synopsis:

NAZUT:   Identifying with the body; if extended, dovetails with physical cosmos.
KHAYAL:   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:   dentifying with the celestial counterpart.
JABARUT:   Human mind accessing the divine mind
LAHUT:   Archetypal level; Divine inheritance, the seedbed of personality.
HAHUT:   Identifying with Divine intelligence beyond consciousness.
TAWHID:   Awakening in life; the Divine spectator, stereoscopic consciousness.
Page 2
The method advocated consists in first shifting our sense of identity, for example identifying ourselves with our subtle body, or aura, or celestial body, or Divine inheritance. Each shift in our sense of identity is accompanied by a new mode of thinking, which we are describing, and triggers off a new awakening. 

There are several awakenings, as we shall see.

We do not wish to force life experience into a theoretical system. However, if we consider a change in our sense of identity as an awakening, then we could see that there are nine awakenings. If we wish to consider the realization clinched at each shift of identity, then we could list five awakenings.


Page 3
Developmental Stages of Spiritual Growth 

We are all on a journey; life is a journey.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 The Sufis have consistently attempted to earmark the steps by which we progress on the inner journey in what is called the Maqamat. From the discrepancies between the various systems, it is apparent that these steps differ from one individual to another. However, it is useful to cull a modicum of information in this regard. 

Abu Nassar al-Sarraj enumerated seven stages:  

1.   Tawba:  Owning our guilt, instead of trying to justify it and then repenting.  
2.   Wara:  An untiring alertness with regard to our conscience.
3.   Zuhd:  Detachment and independence with regard to worldly conditions, the two wings that enable the soul to fly according to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. This includes an impervious attitude towards people's judgment.
4.   Fakr:  Poverty. Murshid points out the difference between want and need. 
5.   Sabr:  Patience. Nature has a way of self-organizing or righting itself if we accede to forego our will to compulsively interfere. This is true in some cases; notwithstanding that using our incentive may be called for at some point. It is difficult  to determine when. The shadow of this quality (patience) is obviously fatalism, a spiritual bypass.
6.   Tawwakul:  Ordinarily interpreted as trust in God. It is the attitude that ensues from a supernal realization, acquired by the initiate at this stage, of a level of action beside which our human strivings pale, a level that bypasses causal laws. Mystics prize the Divine power that emerges in them through God realization and that makes things happen unaccountably.
7.   Rida:  A serene peaceful state in which we have overcome grudges, resentment, frustrations, and disenchantment.

In his elaboration of Sarraj's sketch into 100 thresholds, Sheikh Abdullah Ansari, the Afghan Pir, unveils clue after clue, stage after stage for the assiduous searcher after awakening, stressing the need to make amends for guilt, whether the truth comes to you, or through you, making up for time lost, having the foresight to forsake attachment, observe honesty, overcome grief, fear, worry, hypocrisy, even to overlook habitual faults through dignity, scorning whatever is renounced, heeding one's conscience, devotion, hope, yearning, and so on.1

Sheikh Jabbar Niffari points out that we cannot make the next step until we are ready for it: 
Page 4
As the mystic in his journey is transferred from one station in which he has experienced confirmation and presence, to another, he pauses between the two stations.2

Actually, we are venturing on two parallel, though not unrelated, journeys:

1.   Our involvements, our know-hows, our accomplishments, mortgaged by the accumulated ballast that bogs us down and hampers our freedom.
2.   Our inner journey which, if we do advance, manifests as insight, as an upgraded sense of values, a high attunement, as our dedication to our ideal, our quest for excellence and beauty, together with detachment and independence regarding worldly values. Note that we do not necessarily progress in either our inner or outer journey. Sometimes the same patterns repeat themselves or even people regress instead of progressing. We will not progress unless we do something about it.

The antinomy between our inner being and our personality was aptly portrayed as Janus, the twin-faced Roman God. This disparity may be seen, on one hand, in the influence accruing from both our ancestry and our environment and, on the other hand, in our real countenance, hidden, yet transpiring from behind the mask, our face. The tell tale of our motivations in life leaves a hallmark on our psychological and physical configuration, as illustrated fictionally in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The two journeys are interrelated.  
The inner life is not necessarily in an opposite direction to the  worldly life.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Inner Life p. 67 
If we have a strong enough commitment to the values we recognize in our inner perception, they will affect the way we handle situations in our lives. Counterwise, the means we use to pursue our objectives in our outer journey could impair our inner journey. (The means do not justify the end.) While it seems obvious that the situations in our lives in which we involved ourselves at an earlier immature stage in our inner journey may obstruct our fulfilling the purpose we now wish to pursue in view of our present realization, it is in the way we handle these endemic situations that our spiritual ideals are tested and critically actualized. Pir-o-Murshid says that on one hand we are tested in our love, but on the other hand we are tested in our indifference. Is that a contradiction?  Or is it complementarity? 

We may gain a clearer sense of what the stages of the journey are in Pir-o-Murshid's teaching if we look through the disparate testimonies of his own realization transpiring through his words. We may assess the stages of inner progress that we are going through. Actually, they correspond to the levels of our being, or spheres of reality, according to Sufism.
Page 5
In Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's teachings, the realizations corresponding to each level both in our outer journey and our inner journey are:

 1.  Being concerned with an efficient support system (Nazut) 

In the course of the outer journey, we are concerned with the well being of our physical bodies and commonplace minds; with building a convenient, perhaps comfortable, certainly a more efficient support system for our lives; with living in "lifestyles"  instead of in caves; with the momentous progress in technologies, in transport, in communication, information, security measures, in psychotherapy, and in management. This stage corresponds to the levels described by the Sufis as Nazut. 

 2.  Assessing things in our common mode of thinking (Khayal) 

At this level, regarding the inner journey, we still see things from the point of view of ourselves envisioned as discrete entities. We are concerned with the control of body functions (as in Hatha Yoga) and mental control (as in Raja Yoga). We assume that our individual consciousness is the spectator, not only of the physical world, including our own bodies, but of the psychological and social systems in which we are enmeshed, including our own psyches. This mode of thinking is at the level of Khayal. At this level, one may look for a role model to help one discover one's self.

 3.  Discovering our interrelationship with the universe and with all beings (Arwah) 

This is the level we reach by turning within and identifying with our subtle body. It is a feature of this step that people in our societies are more open to para-physical phenomena, and therefore promote well being by the therapy of the subtle body (as in acupuncture or homeopathy).

With regard to the inner journey, typically in this stage we acknowledge a wider outreach than our skin-bound representation of ourselves, portrayed as our self-image. This manifests as our trying to enhance the effulgence of our aura in meditation, for example. We also become sensitive to the effect of our inner attunement, and of our inner insight upon the configuration of our aura.

It is the exaltation of the spirit which is productive of all beauty.
	 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. Gayan, Boulas
We begin to give credence to our inter-relatedness with all beings. We learn to shunt our consciousness into that of another.

One is in at-(one-ment) with all living beings and it gives one as much insight into another as the other person has of himself.... Not only the thoughts of that person, but his whole spirit is reflected in your spirit. In this consciousness, distance is no longer distance.
                                     Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Mental Purification p. 123 & 125 
Page 6
This affects our outer journey because we become aware of the effect of our concupiscence, of our desire for material possessions or our ambition, and particularly of the unkindness towards others that may foster these gains.

A further sign is in the domain of our thinking: we begin to think holistically. Instead of conceptualizing in categories of thoughts, we are able to reconcile the irreconciliables.
You realize that you are connected with all beings, that there is nothing and no one who is divided or separated from you.
Ibid
Man occupies a certain horizon, as far as he can expand.
Op. cit, p. 232
At this stage, we find inspiration in communing with the attunement (tawajeh) of the beings toward whom we look for guidance. This stage corresponds to the level called Arwah.

 4.  Discovering the need to be creative (Mithal) 

Creativity surfaces by reaching out from inside. Our subtle body now acts as a feedback system that helps us be creative with our personality, which is actually a non space-like form. Now we gain further insight about ourselves by discovering ourselves in the way the different pictures of ourselves are superimposed, and at the same time integrated in our personalities. As in a holograph, we can shift from one picture to another by modulating our focus. Thus, according to our attunement, we may recognize the innocent child in us within its distortion, intermeshed with the wisdom we may have acquired. Our progress in the inner journey is indicated here by our ability to extrapolate between these cliches. 

Looking outside from inside, we learn to translate our attunement and insight into external forms with which we surround ourselves:  art, the environment, inventions, our handling of situations. 

At this level instead of idolizing a teacher, picturing his/her form or personality which we admire, we resonate with his/her attunement. 

Consequently we could define this stage in our inner journey as one in which we are gaining insight into the cosmic matrix of our being without losing its individual core. The journey avers itself to progress from our individuality to our cosmic dimension, instead of envisioning ourselves as discrete entities as we had done previously.
Page 7
The process of going from limitation to perfection is called mysticism... Just as one's own sub-consciousness would awaken one at a certain time, if previously warned, in the same way the consciousness of God is the agency for awakening His manifest-ation. Yet man in this life of illusion has the same intelligence, the perfection of which he can realize in that state of consciousness where he is aware of his own perfection. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Mysticism of Sound: The Word That Was Lost
To become an illuminated soul is only a difference of consciousness.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Healing: The Powers Within 
When one is conscious of limitation, one is limited; when one is       conscious of perfection, one is perfect. 
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Mental Purification, p. 120-122 
Therefore, our greatness or our smallness depends upon our consciousness. It is through consciousness that we become small or great, and through consciousness we either rise or fall, and through consciousness we become narrow or we expand. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Healing: The Expansion of Consciousness
If consciousness of wealth makes one feel rich, and if consciousness    of strength makes one feel strong, how much stronger and richer should he feel who is really God-conscious! 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Healing: The Meaning of Tiredness
In the physical existence each individual is distinct and separate, but behind this physical existence all are one; the consciousness is one. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Akibat: Clairvoyance and Clairaudiance
By making many sacrifices, and practicing renunciation, he will attain that consciousness which is God-consciousness, in which resides all perfection.
Ibid
At this stage, instead of looking outside for guidance, our guide is "whom we could be if we would be what we might be,"  that is, the way God is in the process of becoming as ourselves. The Sufis call this level Mithal.

 5.  Discovering our celestial dimension (Malakut) 

 What are the clues to making the next step in the inner journey? 
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.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Page 8
There is an enticing longing to touch upon that intangible splendor, of which we can only gather a clue at the existential level wherever beauty or majesty or excellence transpire, the sacred, perfection. This lies beyond not only our perception, but also beyond the grasp of our minds, and therefore is unattainable. This longing lures us further and further into a transcendental dimension; therefore our minds represent levels or spheres of reality beyond the existential. 
In this experience the consciousness touches a sphere from whence it cannot get an impression of any name or form. The impression it gets is a feeling, a feeling of illumination, of life, of joy. 
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Healing: The Mystery of Sleep
That which we see of our Beloved is the beauty displayed before our eyes; whereas that aspect of our Beloved which is not manifest to our eyes is the inner model of that beauty of  which our Beloved speaks to us. There comes a time in one's evolution when every touch of beauty moves the heart to tears; it is at this time that the Beloved of the heavens is brought to earth. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

It would evidence our simplistic way of thinking if we would think it is to be found in the heavens (up there). 

There is a place that you cannot reach by going anywhere. 
		Buddha
We occupy only as much horizon as we are conscious of. The next world is the same as this; and this world is the same as the next. Only that which is veiled from our eyes, we call the unseen world. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

This aspiration does inevitably have an effect upon our sense of values by making us weary of  platitudes, of the commonplace, the trite motivations we see being pursued around us - which we ourselves had pursued.
There are strivings which pull one down in the eyes of others and in one's own consciousness, and there are strivings which raise one in the eyes of others and in one's own consciousness. 
	 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Philosophy: The Raising of Consciousness
The moment a person feels that he will no longer remain in prison, the prison bars must break instantly of themselves.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan   

This will alter dramatically our pursuits in the world.
Page 9
As man evolves, he ceases to look down on earth, but looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking....Souls who have become conscious of the angelic spheres hear the calling of that sphere. The more closely a person is drawn to heaven, the more the things of the earth lose their color and taste....Verily who pursueth the world will inherit the world, but the soul that pursueth God will attain in the end to the presence of God... The Soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its loosening the ties of the lower planes...If you do not rise above the things of this world, they will rise above you.
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

However, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan warns us against the sanctimonious dis-regard for what is important to others:
When he cannot put up with conditions around him, he may think that he is a superior person, but in reality the conditions are stronger than him.
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This longing will hoist our consciousness into sublime spheres.
We live in the world to which we are awakened, and to the world to which we are not awakened, we are asleep...The soul in its manifestation on earth is not at all disconnected from the higher spheres. It lives in all spheres, though it is generally  conscious only on one plane. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The key to opening up to the impressions of these sublime spheres lies here in a dramatic shift of our identity. In addition to discovering our cosmic outreach, now we discover our celestial dimension, as Pir-o-Murshid says, "by soaring upwards to those spheres where spiritual exhaltation manifests." 

It is sublime, sacred, an attunement of exaltation, an attitude of glorification.  When we reach the stage where the angelic quality manifests, then we begin to show innocence, simplicity, love for all, sympathy and God-consciousness. A symptom of this step in our inner journey is that we surreptitiously seek situations that trigger off the exaltation of the soul rather than the thrill of the heart. As our sensitivity increases, we become more aware of the levels of emotion. 
The pitch of exaltation can be determined by the different grades to which consciousness rises.  
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Esoteric Papers
Page 10
There is a physical aspect of exaltation which comes as a reaction to or result of having seen the immensity of space, having looked at the wide horizon, or having seen the clear sky, the moonlit night and nature at dawn. Looking at the rising sun, watching the setting sun, looking at the horizon from the sea, being in the midst of nature, looking at the world from the top of a mountain, all these experiences lift us up and give us a feeling which we cannot call sensation. It is exaltation.

Here ecstasy is triggered off by the perception of nature in its most alluring expression; but it is still dependent upon perception. However, to tune ourselves to the resonance of the celestial spheres, we find exaltation when our humanness is sublimated. 
A higher aspect of exaltation is a moral exaltation-when we are sorry for having said or done something unpleasant; when we have asked forgiveness, and humbled ourselves before  someone towards whom we were inconsiderate. We have humbled our pride then. Or when we felt a deep gratitude to someone who had done something for us; when we have felt love, sympathy, devotion which seems endless and which seems so great that our heart cannot accommo-date it; when we have felt so much pity for someone that we have forgotten ourselves; when we have found a profound happiness in rendering a humble service to someone in need; when we have said a prayer which has come from the bottom of our heart; when we have realized our own limitation and smallness in comparison with the greatness of God; all these experiences lift man up...even such an experience as watching the little smiles of an innocent infant.
Ibid
Ecstasy, erupting through the very appraisal of the "elegance" of the driving intelligence of the universe, which is shattering our commonplace mind, will reveal a meaningfulness beyond our ken that opens totally new perspectives to our understanding. No sooner are we able to recognize our celestial identity than a mode of knowledge, transcending that which was acquired by experience, is revealed. 
Ecstasy comes by touching the reason of reasons and by realizing the essence of wisdom.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Oct. 11
While Pir-o-Murshid says, "Wisdom is born out of the co-mingling of the knowledge of the heavens with the know-how of the earth." He does clarify that we need to downplay experiential knowledge to grasp this higher knowledge.   However: 
Intelligence confined to knowledge of phenomena becomes limited, but when it is free from all knowledge, then it experiences its own essence. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  Jan. 25th
Page 11
If one goes further, there is consciousness in its aspect of pure intelligence, because it is the knowing of things that blunts the faculty of knowledge.... Consciousness is covered by something which it is conscious of. The moment that cover is taken away, it is pure intelligence....it is a kind of omniscient condition. 
 	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, ibid, p. 123
This tallies with Ibn 'Arabi, who says, "Knowledge is a veil upon the known," or Ansari, who says, "The annihilation of knowledge is in the known." (p. 142)

At this level, we have overpassed any consideration of form, or image, or conceptual teaching; therefore, rather than envisioning God as the perfect archetype, we discover God as the Spectator, and our consciousness as a derivation from God, as paramount intelligence. Now the known avers itself to be the knower. The emotion erupting out of our discovery of our celestial identity triggers off a total reversal of the commonplace assumption that we are the spectator. We shift our subjective focal center and identify with God as the Spectator,  a total turnabout of perspective which confers a revealed knowledge instead of an acquired knowledge.
There is a still deeper sphere to which our memory is linked, and that sphere is the universal memory; in other words, the Divine mind where we do not only collect what we have seen or heard or known, but where we can even touch something we have never learned, heard, known or seen. For this the doors of memory should be laid open. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  ibid,  p. 137
Who so draws not knowledge from the spring of knowledge, knows not the reality. 
 				Ansari p. 40

Mastery in accomplishment will equally give us ecstasy.

If one can make oneself obey one's own will one will surely rise to a greater exaltation.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Gathas II: Will Power
At this stage in our  inner journey we will be almost compulsively drawn to any expression of glorification. We will see the forms of the ritual as simply devices to trigger off a level of exaltation that sparks a sense of deja vu of the heavenly spheres.


Religious prayers, rituals, and ceremonies were intended to produce exaltation, for it is one of the treasures of life; exaltation is as necessary, or perhaps even more so, as the cultivation of thought. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Alchemy of Happiness 
Page 12
Eventually exaltation is enigmatically self-generated. This represents an advanced stage in the inner journey. 
Sometimes exaltation may be the outcome of sensation. It is possible; but at the same time exaltation which is beyond price comes of itself, as soon as we have shown an inclination towards it. 
					Ibid
At this stage, the role model to inspire us on the path is that element in us that Suhrawardhi calls "the witness in the heavens." This level corresponds to the level which the Sufis call Malakut, the celestial level.

 6.  Discovering the software transcending even one's latent potentialities (Jabarut and Lahut) 

Now we are ready for the most magically creative stage. It is not the unfurling of latent, dormant potentialities as in the Mithal stage, but rather a totally different mode of creativity linking us with the archetypal level of which our personalities are the exemplars, a level beyond causality. The difference between our latent qualities lying within, ready to be unfurled, given favorable conditions, and the unlimited all-possibilities inherent in what we might call the software of the existential reality, could be illustrated by the difference between the continual recycling of the seed through the plant as compared with its mutation. In its recycling, the seed is subject to determinism, causality; but the variables presiding over its mutation are infinite and hence, unpredictable. This could again be demonstrated by the fact that, while every cell of our body carries the code of our whole body, the cells of our immune system are open to develop unforeseeable faculties ad infinitum.

Such is genuine creativity. It is unpredictable and hence involves levels of reality beyond the known.
It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the preconditioning of law, the chance substrate upon which law is built.
		Andreas Speiser 3
We find evidence the "pull of a future that is exploratory," rather than the "push of the past," insofar as it determines the present. In fact, we are referring to a state that is neither initial nor forthcoming, because it transcends the arrow of time.

The exemplar now discovers its relationship with the archetype through the discovery of what the archetype has of itself in the exemplar. Consequently,  the personality of the inner wayfarer may now exhibit qualities beyond even its latent idiosyncrasies, because the divine archetypes, predicated by all that manifests in the universe, are themselves unlimited and hence undefinable. The Sufis ascribe them to the Divine intention.
Page 13
Therefore to reach this stage on the inner journey, instead of envisioning the cosmic dimension of our being in holistic fashion, as at the Arwah level, we need to relate our sense of identity to its archetype.  Imagine a rose seeing itself as the expression of "rosehood." Imagine that we see our qualities as the expressions of their perfect models which we ascribe to God!
When one says that the Truth most glorious comprehends all beings, the meaning is that He comprehends them as a cause comprehends its consequences, not that He is a whole containing them as His parts....
					Jami, p. 21
Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithal) in the higher world. The forms in the higher world preserve the existence of their likeness in the lower world. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each form to its likeness. 
	Ibn' Arabi, Fut.  III 260, 6; Cf Chittick, 1989, p. 406
...These are like ladders for the angels, while the meanings that descend in these tenuities are like angels.
	Ibn'Arabi, Fut. III, 28,32, Cf Chittick, ibid, pp. 406-7 

To achieve this requires a tour de force in our thinking: instead of assessing the potentialities latent in us, we discover unlimited possibilities not yet existent. The Sufis call this Imkan and Buddha calls it the sphere of all-possibility.

Now, having transited through the volte-face at the Jabbarut level, instead of reaching out towards the universe from our personal center, we recognize the universe forming itself as us.  Moreover, the intention, even the nostalgia of the universe (what we mean by God), is to discover potentialities unknown to Him/Herself as us. 

This for the Sufis, establishes a knightly relationship between us as the vassals, and the Lord whose qualities we actualize in our personalities.
Then God makes him journey through his Names [that is, His archetypes] in order to show him His signs. Thus the server comes to know that he is designed by every name. It is through these names that God appears to the server.
					Ibn'Arabi
Page 14
Each manifest being is the form of a lordly name. The Rabb, the Lord, becomes a reality in relationship with a being who is designated in the passive form.
				Henri Corbin
The Divinity seeks for a being whose God it is. The Divine sovereignty has a secret, and that is thou.
				Sahl Tostari
We might recognize two complementary states here, which may be discovered on the inner journey in two steps: 

1.   Thinking of our personality as the exemplar of the Divine Being.
2.   Letting go of our human identity and identifying with the archetype of which our personality is simply the exemplar through which God, as the ultimate reality behind the existential show, makes Himself (Itself) known.

When thou perceives, thou seest limitation openly, and thou seest Me at the back of the unseen. When thou art with Me, thou seest the opposites and him whom I have caused to witness them.  
					Niffari, p. 50
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out the complementary view to our own personal one:
Therefore the ultimate aim of the eternal Consciousness in undertaking a journey to the plane of mortality is to realize its eternal being.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Akibat, Manifestation
God discovers His Perfection in our limitation....Therefore the soul may be considered to be a condition of God, a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time.... The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man, one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Now our  role model is our  projection of what  we imagine to  be Divine perfection.

Just as one's own sub-consciousness would awaken one at a certain time, if previously warned, in the same way the conscious-ness of God is the agency for awakening His manifestation, projecting itself through different names and forms to accomplish His desire of being known.
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  Spiritual Liberty (Prophets)
The Sufis call this level Lahut.

Page 15

 7.  Awakening beyond life (Hahut) 

If it were not for our strong committment to our responsibilities or to service in real life situations; if it were not for our delight in wonderful people, in acts of heroism, and in the achievements of great civilizations; if it were not for our bewonderment when enjoying the beauty and negotiating the power of nature, we could find ourselves continually disapointed by the greed and cruelty of many, and the sham values pursued. We tend to turn away from the world and seek that which lies behind the scene and scenario of life, which powers the miracle of life. To grasp the reality behind the here and now, it is easier to downplay the existential actuality and highlight "that which transpires from behind what appears," than it is to extrapolate between the two perspectives. This would then represent a further stage in the journey.
	
Now the existential world appears simply as a perspective, like an optical illusion evidences that our consciousness is captured in a certain perspective. The consequence is otherwordliness, detachment, alienation, the way of the ascetic, the monk or the nun, the anchorite. On the other hand, we find ourselves awakening on the other side of a veil, into a realness that confirms our sense of the illusory and deceptive nature of our usual representation of life.

When the unreality of life pushes against my heart, its door opens to the reality.
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Nirtan, Gamakas

The consequence is a sense of freedom, emancipation, authenticity, exaltation, ecstasy and serenity.

The criterion determining this stage on the inner journey is the degree to which we are able to shift our personal consciousness into God consciousness without losing ourselves, or rather to see our selves' center as the customizing of the cosmic/transcendent reality we call God.

There is a stage at which, by touching a particular phase of existence, we feel raised above the limitations of life, and are given that power: peace and freedom of light and life, which belong to the source of all beings. In that moment of supreme exaltation, we are not only united with the source of all beings, but dissolved in it, for the source is in ourselves. 

Here it is, the Being whose attributes served as our role model, who is revealed to us irrespective of the devices whereby we may gain a clue to His/Her nature.

There is a further stage at which one knows God by God, instead of through His signs...discovery of Himself through one.
					Ibn'Arabi 
This is the level that the Sufis call Hahut and the Yogis call Samadhi. 
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 8.  Grasping the unity underlying multiplicity and the multiplicity iinherent in unity (Tawhid) 
Exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.  
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Alchemy of Happiness 
As we progress in our realization and advance in our inner journey, we increasingly find ourselves in a state where, although unintentional, our perspective suddenly shifts and fluctuates. This perspective moves between grasping a basic unity underlying the multiplicity of what our minds had conceived as discrete objects, persons or events (an example would be emphasizing the grasp of the sea at the cost of the grasp of the waves); or on the other hand, apprehending that what appears as objects becomes manifest by dint of a plethora of ephemeral and elusive projections of the multifarious bounty inherent in the Oneness (like the minerals present within a distillate, but only apparent at the point at which they precipitate). 
According to Kalabadhi4: tafrid is the mystical state where one sees unity in multiplicity (wahdat) and tajrid, the state in which one sees multiplicity in unity (Wahdadiyat). Titus Burckhardt defines al-Wahadiya as the way that Unity appears in its various aspects, and al-Wahid'ya as the unity hidden behind these predicates.5 

This becomes not only an ever-recurring feature during our meditation, but even while active in everyday life situations. Eventually we catch  a third perspective whereby we are able to extrapolate between these antipodal perspectives.
One becomes conscious of one's own self in God, and of God in one's self. Man is divine limitation and God is human perfection. 
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It is just like touching the Presence of God, when one's consciousness has become so light and so liberated and free that it can raise itself and dive and touch the depths of one's being.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  Healing: The Mystery of Sleep
We reach the realization of which Ibn'Arabi speaks:
Thou art not thou, thou art He without thou; not He entering into you, nor thou entering into Him. Thou art not ceasing to be nor still existing. Then if thou know thy existence thus, then thou knowest God; and if not, then not.
	 Ibn'Arabi, Whoso Knoweth Himself, p. 4, 5 Beshara Publications
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When all idea of this external being is gone, then comes the consciousness of the unlimited Being of God.
                                     Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Sufi Teachings, Self Realization
When asked what is the message of our time, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan said:
It is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the Divinity of man. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Unity: The Sufi Message
The Sufis call this level Tawhid.


__________________
1 From Mystic Way Stations, a translation of Ansari's Kitab-al-Manazil as-Sa'irin (being prepared for publication), pp. 24-51.
2 The Mawakif and Mukhatabat of Jabbar al-Niffare, edited by Arberry, Cambridge University Press, 1935.
3 Speiser, Uber die Freiheit, Basler Universitaetsreden, 28, Basel, 1950, p. 8.
4 Kitab al Taaruf, tr. as Traite du Soufisme, Ed. Sinbad, 1981. See comments by Anawati and Louis Gardet, in Mystique Musulmane, Vrin, 1961, p. 97-121.
5 Du Soufisme, Ed Derain, Lyon 1952, p. 32.


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Nazut and Khayal: Steps toward Awakening


In the art of meditation, we train our minds in the skill of extending the range of our vantage point beyond the usual setting of our consciousness focalized in a focal point. This is illustrated by the wazifa Ya Basit. By shifting the focus of our consciousness, we can free ourselves from the constraint of our restrictive vantage point. Just as we can modulate our glance between encompassing a wide panorama or pinpointing a letter in a book we are reading, we can modulate our consciousness between envisioning the universe as a global reality while losing our sense of the details, or highlighting an event while failing to grasp all its implications or ramifications. 

If we achieve the likeness of this by offsetting our consciousness, we 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 of the "I" in the notion of the personal dimension, 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
 Nazut 

As we exhale, we envision our consciousness expanding, encompassing increasingly wider fields of perception and mentation. Now if we think that our body was confectioned out of the stardust, that the outburst of radiance at the instant of the big bang continues to live now as our body, our sense of identity, our notion of ourselves, extends. Our 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 it sunders all attachment....Every atom turns bewildered...and it is only God circling Himself.
							Jelaluddin Rumi 
We can take advantage of our 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. This acts more powerfully still when we feel our body magnetism, rather like the field of a magnet, which extends beyond the boundaries of 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. We realize 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. 
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Try to experiment. If we stretch the notion of ourselves as we exhale, we run the risk of either losing our sense of individual identity or identifying with the cosmos. We discover ourselves as a vortex without boundary. This is illustrated by the wazifa ya Basit. However, as we inhale, we notice that the cosmos gets converged as us (wazifa: ya Qabid). If we do not recover our personal identity, a flood of impressions will overcome us obsessively, which is precisely what happens in pathological mental states. This is where we discover that it is our sense of our uniqueness, reflecting the incomparable Divine uniqueness, ya Wahid, as an individual that confers upon us the ability to select those impressions which we can handle, and those from which we need to protect ourselves.

We realize the danger of eschewing our 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 ya Wasi. This is what Buddha meant by the sentinels. Besides, it is our individuality that makes for the rich variety of existence (ya Mughni). It 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 we think of ourselves as an eddy that intersperses other eddies in infinite regress without losing its idiosyncratic features.

Incidentally, this is further illustrated in the Dhikr where we say or think La ilaha. Describing an arc of a circle with our head, we expand while the La warns us against assuming that the environment is what we may believe it to be. As we say or think illa as our head turns towards the solar plexus, we are reminded that this warning applies also to our psyche and self-image. These then are the conditions for hoisting our consciousness into the higher spheres as we say or think llah, then awakening to God consciousness in existence: Hu. We can take advantage of our inhaling to observe that, thanks to our memory, the physical scene or scenario continues to live in our psyche while we downplay our perception of it. 

Under careful scrutiny we notice that we recollect the physical scene such as it appeared from our vantage point; for example, Notre Dame of Paris. If we had seen it only from another angle, our 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. This is 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 viewpoints 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. 
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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 our personal perspective or alternately dismissing it as maya. This requires the most utter detachment from our personal bias. Suddenly everything assumes great clarity; it is as though we had awakened from an illusion (Ya Khabir). Our psyche had masked reality and we had taken our assessment for granted. Now we have shaken off the hoax. If we apply this to our appraisal of the physical world, we will enjoy a sudden breakthrough of awakening, so our 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 we simply plunge into the reality of the universe or the realness of physical phenomena. We 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
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 a 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 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 our impact upon the prevailing circumstances with the result of increasing our sphere of influence (Ya Malik ul Mulk).
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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, a mechanism which works by the thought power of each individual soul. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 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: "either" not "and," this tree/that tree, subject/object, I/it, spirit/matter, immortality/transiency, transcendence/immanence. 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. 
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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 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.
 									Henri Corbin
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Arwah: The Introspective Mode

In the last chapter, we described how we feel when our sense of identity expands and how it affects our way of thinking. In the present chapter we are describing what we experience as we turn within. Shall we call it the introspective mode?

When we are in the introspective mode, as we turn within and consider the environment, it appears vastly different to how it appears in our normal consciousness. Our relationship with the environment is dramatically altered. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan communicates his experience:
 When I open my eyes to the outer world, I feel myself as a drop in the sea; but when I close my eyes and turn within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.

In the cosmic state we experience everything interspersed with everything else. We also see how the interspersed elements are somewhat congruently interconnected.
 The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order. 
						David Bohm
This space of three dimensions is reflected in the space that is in the inner dimension. The inner dimension is different. It does not belong to the objective world; but what exists in the inner dimension is also reflected in the three dimensional space. 

						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
To illustrate the way the universe appears in this setting of consciousness, imagine the universe as a hologram in which two or more interrelated pictures are projected so we could toggle between highlighting one or another, or even extrapolate them. As we have seen, these pictures are interspersed, not diversely located, and more important, they are features of an underlying wholeness.

We find ourselves in a transfigured universe which appears much richer than the way the universe appears in the ordinary setting of consciousness transpiring through the apparent world that now seems illusory.

The one who tunes oneself not only to the external but to the inner being and to the essence of all things gets an insight into the essence of the whole being, and therefore one can, to the same extent, find and enjoy even in the seed, the fragrance and beauty which delight one in a rose.
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Furthermore, we discover ourselves as very different from what we thought we were. We ourselves are transfigured. This may be reminiscent of the state of lucid dreaming in which we assume a totally unfamiliar personality contrasting with the personality we remember we had in our diurnal state.
In the physical world, you are here and everything is without you - you are contained in space. In the dream, all that you see is contained within you. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
If we let ourselves be lured deeper within, downplaying the consciousness of our physical body, we feel as though we were made of a fine texture - like gossamer. Maybe we are sensing our life-field or electromagnetic field.

We can distinguish several layers intertwined. We find it most intriguing because behind one layer we find another finer one: that which we discover behind one veil avers itself in turn to be another veil!

 The external life is but the shadow of the inner reality. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Sufi metaphysics (Tasawwuf) distinguishes several veils screening, and at the same time revealing by their configuration, whatever erupts behind the apparent (Zahir), the shroud (Hijab). We can espy, behind the profile of our face, the countenance that transpires through the cells of our face:
 ...that which transpires behind that which appears. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
It evidences a deeper reality (Batin), the etheric template, more cosmic and lasting; that which this illusive reality reveals (Tajalliat).
Whither you turn, there is the Face of God....Everything is perishing except His Face. 
					Qur'an 
This would mean that behind all faces, the Face of God is hidden.
God is hidden in His creation. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Pondering upon our experience now it occurs to us that, while at the jagged ends of our being we dovetail with the environment (in fact the universe), at the center of our being we seem to be continually reabsorbed in a void (an undifferentiated implicate state), then recurrently reformed or reborn anew (an Islamic view).
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At this point, turning within has lost any reference to space. We have lost our sense of space.
Where art Thou, since my space has convoluted?
					 al Hallaj
As any vestige of a sense of bodiness has absconded, we lose the feel of the gravity pull of the planet. Just as when we intone illa we cease whirling, as we keep turning deeper within we reach into the void, al 'ama, at the epicenter of our being, our solar plexus.
The foundation of Khalwa [seclusion] is al Khala, the void. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
If we hold our breath between inhaling and exhaling, concentrating on our solar plexus (particularly if we attempt the dervish whirling or intoning illa when repeating the Dhikr), we have a sense of touching upon a vulnerable state of unstable equilibrium (called Kemal by the Sufis) such that we find ourselves prone to react to the slightest nudge. This could be illustrated by an aircraft, which as it reaches the stalling point is totally subjected to the slightest breeze, or the muscles of our arm, which can be triggered off by the flicker of a thought. This state of delicately balanced dynamic tension is used by Sufis to trigger off a sudden change from one state (hal) to another.
Divinity is like the seed that grows in the heart of the flower; it is the same seed that was the origin of the plant and it comes again in the heart of the flower. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Discovering this cosmic law in ourselves allows us to recognize our ability to effect dramatic changes in our being by our realization.
As the whole universe is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by oneself. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Concentrating on our solar plexus, we discover that the core of our being is immaculate, however much we may feel tarnished either by the spillover of the world, or of our own transgressions. It acts as a mirror simply boomeranging back impressions from the physical and psychological environment as well as inside from our psyche which, though normally envisioned as being inside, now seems external.
The spirit is like a mirror which does not retain the impressions upon it. By turning the mirror, the impressions are effaced.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Holding our breath between inhaling and exhaling, we discover a condition of time whereby the forward march of the arrow of time is interrupted, just like the motion of a pendulum is suspended as it reaches the farthest reach of its swing. In this state of suspense a different dimension of time (imagine a vertical vector) seems to intercept the process of becoming (the horizontal vector) to which we limit time in our ordinary thinking.

We discover the difference between (1) the sense of time experienced in the first awakening, the moment of time where the past overlaps with the future to the extent it can be predetermined and therefore foreseeable in a here and now whose edges remain nebulous; and (2) the instant of time where, according to the Sufis, the arrow of time is intersected by a second dimension of time moving from transcendence to transience and vice-versa.
Waqt [the instant of time] is like a sharp sword that cuts the guilt of the past and the expectations of the future. 
					Hujwiri
The programming of the universe provides for the chance of making a fresh start, opening a new chapter starting from scratch. We can take advantage of this Divine gift, the divine grace (Rahman and Rahim), but we have to merit that grace by repenting and making a pledge never to repeat the mistake. The pledge marks a hiatus, an apostrophe in the process of becoming, intercepting the chain of causal conditioning, the law. In Kabala, it is Chesed rather than Din.

Fluttering over our consciousness is a whiff of what it would be like to be liberated from the conditioning of the past and the feed-forward of our destiny that our limited self built out of inadequacy.

Referring back to the vortex model: the vortex does not simply converge the environment and boomerang it back. Let us consider life as recurrently rebirthing itself and reemerging from the unsounded depths of the void, in new unpredictable ways.. This assures a future that is immeasurably exciting.
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Mode of Thinking while Attuned to Arwah

Before exploring further dimensions of awakening, it is advisable to take stock of where we are and then anticipate new horizons. Therefore, let us step back, then move forward. 

As a preliminary, it is good to have clear aspirations. If we are sensitive and if we are bereft of the spiritual values in our human condition and have a need for the sacred, we feel impoverished, incomplete, uprooted. We may even notice a tendency to slip into rank material greed which may lead unwittingly into unkindness with its attendant violence. Alternately, we may simply sport a bad self-image.

We have a choice between basing our value system upon religious belief, complete with a set of "dos" and "don'ts," or cultivating our latent faculties of insight. The latter step is indicative of the evolution of consciousness in the human being which is being accelerated in our day and age in those who are at the prow of the advance of our civilizations.
With the maturity of the soul, one desires to probe the depths of life. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This is precisely what has been highly prized by the initiatic traditions as "awakening." Clearly this is our objective here. In the Sufi tradition, we are moreover intent on applying the insight gained in fostering the unfurling of the potentialities latent in our personalities to its effect upon our accomplishments in real life situations.  

To reprise the conclusions we have arrived at so far:

1.	Extend the outreach of our conscious field beyond its middle-range purview, by decentralizing and expanding our conscious field. 

As we have seen, our notion of ourselves becomes increasingly bountiful; moreover our self image dovetails with the psychic environment. We find an apt illustration for this if we were to throw pebbles on the surface of a lake. The eddies tend to merge into what physicists call a "wave-interference pattern." The peaks and troughs either reinforce one another or neutralize one another. We confirm this in our relationship with people. Sometimes our mettle is spurred, our self-confidence reinforced, by discovering similarity with another person; sometimes we find solace in completing another who is quite opposite from ourselves. 

To pursue the analogy: as we try to earmark these eddies, at some point we lose sight of the individual eddies, although physicists tell us that they can be retrieved. Precisely in the same way we find as we expand our consciousness our mind is confronted with a paradox because, while merging with the environment, we can at the same time maintain our identity.
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If we identify with our subtle body (arwah), in addition to merging with the physical environment, we experience an osmosis with the psyche of other people. We find traces of them in ourselves and discover some quintessential whiff of ourselves in them. This is the attunement of Ya Basit.
If one is able to expand oneself to the consciousness of another person, one's consciousness becomes as large as two persons or a thousand persons. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
However, what we are aiming at is, rather than blurring at the jagged ends, learning to sense the boundaries of our outreach. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls this our domain. We can survey the areas in our life situation within which we exercise some measure of responsibility (ya Wasi). Try to assess its boundaries. The more encompassing it is, the greater our sovereignty. ya Wasi combines beautifully with ya Wali. We can envision our impact on circumstances as an expression of the Divine nostalgia, Ishq Allah, to handle situations in such a way as to actualize the harmony underlying the Divine planning, ya Samad.
It is owing to our limitation that we cannot see the whole being of God; but all that we love and admire belongs to that beauty beloved by all. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
2.	Now we compare this experience with how we feel when turning within. We discover a whole different relationship with the environment. 

Instead of conceiving of ourselves as a discrete entity merging with the environment, we now envision ourselves emerging as an individual out of an impersonal seedbed that is ascribed to what we mean by God as the One and Only Being, Ya Mubdi, the originator.
Thou wast not aware that thou wast He. Then when the knowledge came upon thee, thou understandest that thou knowest God by God, not by thyself. 
			Ibn 'Arabi, Know Thyself
Those to whom unity is revealed see the absolute in the parts.
			Shabistari, The Scented Garden

If we keep envisioning ourselves as made of gossamer or a boundless aura, converged from the light of the galaxies, our sense of space and time collapses. In this unfamiliar perspective, where we have lost the sense of being located in a definite spot in space, our consciousness is spread out, as it were, from inside. Consequently an uncanny realization dawns upon us:
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When a being becomes the truth, he reads into the hearts of all beings, like an open book....While an ordinary person can see the action of another, the seer can see the reason...the cause behind the cause...the primal cause.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We see how situations are interconnected at their roots while we would not have grasped that connection in our ordinary consciousness. We are awaking to a whole new dimension of insight which we ordinarily call intuitive.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan refers to a situation in which we feel upset and while on our way you witness an accident. Somehow these two are connected though not causally. This is a case of C.G. Jung's "synchronicity."

Retracing our steps, we recall that to clinch this alternate perspective, we needed to relinquish our ordinary notion of ourselves and discard the usual focus of our consciousness as the observer.
 Our minds and bodies, being reflected upon a portion of  the all-pervading consciousness, make that part of consciousness an all-pervading soul which, in reality, is a universal spirit.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We also had to give up our ordinary understanding and grasp, as Pir-o-Murshid says, the understanding of the soul rather than of the mind. 

Indeed, for each level of identity a mode of thinking corresponds. We discover this mode of understanding buried beneath our thinking. Envisioning ourselves as the veiled one, Batin, in the silence of the activity of our mind, will have the effect of freeing us from the compellingness of our ordinary thinking, now seen as a veil. 

To withdraw our consciousness from the "pull" of the ordinary appearance of the physical world in order to turn within, we can try resorting to a curious blend of detachment and interest. A person who arrives at the state of indifference by going through interest attains the blessed state. Pir-o-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan invites the impact of the universe upon us, which is what is meant by the Divine operation. 
	The work of the spiritual man is to forget his false self and to realize the true Self which is God.
 						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

You thus invite the Divine operation upon you.
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Our sense of time is also altered, so we can see how new dispensations intercept the process of becoming. While identifying with our life-field, we can think of ourselves as recurrently reformed, that is, as the emergence of the ever recurrent, impersonal, non-manifest aspect of God manifesting itself to view.  We can try to grasp qualities as they traverse the threshold between our unconscious and our conscious field to take root in our personality. We reinforce them by our awareness.
As the whole of nature is made by God, so the nature of each individual is made by himself.
 						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now we are tapping the source of creativity within our own selves,  surfacing from impersonal unsounded depths. The corresponding implicit mode of thinking will appear as the nature of metaphor.
I am a metaphor of God transported in man, not an analogy of man to God, nor a manifestation of God, nor an infusion of the spirit of God in a material receptacle. 
					al Hallaj 
We can watch our thoughts surfacing out of the pool of what seems like the thinking of the universe. Our individual thoughts customize these cosmic seed thoughts which for the Sufis belong to the level of metaphor, al Mithal. We are thereby diversifying that which otherwise would appear as generalization, just as in music variations on a theme bring out the potentialities locked within it. Our processing of the thinking of the universe enriches the universe. This is what creativity is about.
In man, the Creator has, so to speak, completed nature.Yet, the creative faculty is still working through man.... Man is a miniature Brahma, the Creator. If man were aware of his creativity, he would create as he wished and would make a world of his own. This is the work of the masters who grow to become, with their spiritual advancement, creators of their own world.
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As we meditate, we observe creative thoughts as they surface from the unknown in the vacuum of our subtle body (Arwah). Introspecting, we may ascertain that, while indeed they were triggered off by impressions from "outside," they are not simply reactions to the challenge of the environment, but arise ex-nihilo, as the church fathers say, unpredictably. They eschew our will so unmistakably that perhaps more than ever we find it difficult to determine the edge between what is our incentive and what may be ascribed to God, or the impact of the universe upon each fraction of itself. In fact, in creativity we encounter the basic paradox. While we realize we are embedded in the ultimate oneness without a boundary, at some level of our being we delegate the Divine will by our incentive and thus enjoy some relative autonomy. 
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He creates of Himself. Therefore the creation and the Creator are not two. Or rather they are two, but at the same time they are not. 
					Ibn'Arabi
Creativity is not only the fresh perception of new meanings, and the ultimate unfoldment of this perception within the manifest and the somatic, but I would say that it is ultimately the action of the infinite in the sphere of the finite. 
					David Bohm 
Moreover, we find these germinations of original seed-thoughts gel into forms by dint of the very nature of our imaginative faculty. We can fashion our aura by translating these creative thoughts into human features. R. P. Teilhard de Chardin calls this "the hominization of God."
 Thus the ascensions of saints are the ascensions of their spirit, and the vision of their hearts, the vision of forms in the intermediate world of pure spirits. 
 								Ibn'Arabi
In this state of awakening, since we have ceased to interpret our problems as they appear to our personal assessment, our involvement with our situation assumes greater clarity. We see what in us is involved in the situation, and we see what are the implications, the issues enacted by the apparent situations. 
 
It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this or that. Moreover,  by grasping emerging thoughts, we are able to counter our problems creatively rather than being subjected to them.

In this attunement we have forfeited any justification to mask our motivations which stand out unequivocally in the light of our sincerity.
In a small affair, or in a big affair, first consult yourself and find out if there is any conflict in your own being about anything you want to do. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
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Mithal: The Metaphysical Level

The key to awakening to the level of Mithal is, as we have seen in the previous chapter, in shifting our sense of identity by discovering the deeper reality of our physical body to be rather gossamer. As seen from inside, our physical body now seems like the crystalization of the volatile, evanescent, quintessential subtle body that we now discover ourselves to be. It does seem to have some kind of configuration, but is without a profile, rather like our countenance, continually shifting, sometimes shimmering.

If we can reach out from within, which is best done as we exhale, we find that in the perspective of inverted space where everything intersperses everything else, our subtle body dovetails with those of kindred beings. Moreover, it seems to oscillate in sympathetic resonance or sometimes jams in dissonance as our signature tune finds its place in the cosmic symphony.

Our perception of matter has altered. For example, instead of light appearing as radiating from a source, we can see, as Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan showed, that in this perspective, light is all-pervading.

In contrast, as we inhale we regain our sense of personal identity, discovering that, while we enrich ourselves with the bounty of the universe, we do enjoy freewill in selecting those elements we wish to ingest and those which we find difficulty incorporating. 

Paradoxically while the model of the vortex came naturally to our mind when we exhaled, now when we inhale as we turn within we find that quite the opposite strikes us. Now we appear to be somewhat of the nature of a cell endowed with a permeable boundary. Rather we have the impression of being formed of concentric zones, or buffers, each exhibiting the characteristics of protective thresholds. Consciously place sentinels at the door of perception, screening not only what we ingest from the environment, but also the unwanted features at the periphery of our psyche, which are a spillover from the psychological environment which are not in resonance with our real being. 

We can try not to place a wall between ourselves and the environment, incarcerating ourselves in our psyche and dismissing the world as many meditators do. When blinded by the more overt nature of things we miss out on reality in its subtle, covert attire; we cannot see the stars while the sun is visible. Thus protected from the glare, we can reach outside from within, highlighting the Divine intention bursting forth in the miracle of life, in the marvel of the cosmos, and in the great achievements of civilizations, of human thought, creativity and ingenuity, thus boosting our self-image and enhancing our creativity. 

A sentinel allows some things to pass through and rejects others. We can see how by our willfulness to adapt to the environment, while gaining invaluable resources, we tend to ingest indiscriminately, at the periphery of our personality, elements that distort our specific uniqueness.
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One asks oneself how all that one sees affects one and how one reacts to it; how does one's spirit react to the objects or the conditions that one encounters, to the sounds one hears, to the words that people speak to one; and further, what effect one has on others, on conditions, on those individuals one comes in contact with. 
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
While being implicated with the overall reality, we are aware of being furnished with boundaries, albeit permeable. This is evidenced by our ability to make a choice ensuring our uniqueness within the global unity. 
Those to whom unity is revealed see the absolute whole in the parts, yet each is in despair because of the particularization from the whole. 
			Shabistari
If we now strive to maintain great clarity as we meditate, we find our mind is obliged to accept what seems contradictory: that we can be inextricably enmeshed in the totality, yet preserve our identity. 

Only in an atmosphere of serenity can we find your attunement. As we hold our breath, as we discover the deeper core of our self, we are struck by recognizing how genuinely "me" it is. It is as though we discovered ourselves for the first time! It seems somehow to be larger, more universal than our ordinary self-image and we notice it is ever-recurrent, rather than sclerosed. Moreover it appears to dovetail in its seedbed with a latent network out of which all creatures surface-the template of all kin, the fountainhead of all creativity.

Having now had a sense of your real being, we realize that our environment, our circumstances; the greed, the grossness, the brutality we witness in life, draws us away from our own germane authenticity. Our clamoring for the sacred overwhelms our thoughts. We wish to discover our real being and we strive to obtain this precious jewel in the course of a retreat. Let us be wary of the easy course, escapism.
Some seek refuge in a retreat because they are over-stressed by society, oppressed by the view of the world, even of their family, perturbed by incessant activity, and are on the quest for tranquility. Others seek in a retreat the delights that one hopes to encounter. These are indeed weak motivations which will not confer spiritual stations or spiritual ranks. 
					Ibn'Arabi
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When he cannot put up with conditions around him, he may think that he is a superior person, but in reality conditions are stronger than he. 
						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We would be missing out on discovering the clues whereby the Divine reality is revealed in everyday life.
When the contemplative does not see anything else than God in all beings, the void [khala: root of Khalwa, retreat] is impossible. 
					Ibn'Arabi
Therefore, it is a greater achievement if we can maintain our perspicacity in an awakened state in everyday life. However, we may take a sabbatical for a short time to get in touch with the deeper recesses of our soul, since the challenges of our ordinary lives make it exceedingly difficult to achieve this.

The key to withstanding the "pull" of the ordinary appearance of the physical world to facilitate turning within is difficult to acquire because it consists in overcoming our attachment to favorable physical amenities or from emotional dependence. By downplaying input from outside, we favor the emergence from within of thoughts that are not determined by existential conditions. 
How are meditative souls awakened? How do they maintain themselves in the experience of the inner life? In the first place the adept values his object of attaining the inner life more than anything else, more than wealth, position, rank. Seclusion, silence, thoughtfulness, meditation and gentleness, all these make circumstances in their life appropriate for receiving illumination.
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
In a previous chapter, we learned, while in the first mode of thinking, to consider objects and phenomena as signs, clues as to the nature of Reality or God. Now as we enter the retreat, or as we turn within in our meditations, try to spot these clues inside.
The first revelation unveiled to the retreatant is that the signs of the world need to precede the signs that he finds in his soul, for the world is prior to his soul. 
						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now while turned within, we can recollect how the physical scene appeared when we were in our ordinary consciousness; it varied according to our vantage point.  For example, if we have seen Notre Dame of Paris from different angles, we know how very different an object looks purely depending upon the vantage point. 
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Now we can recollect our life situations, our relations with people. We notice we can look at the problem one way or another way, yet somehow these views are dynamically related. Therefore as Yoga points out, we are carrying in our psyche a biased picture of the world, of ourselves and of our relationship with the world. Consequently, if we wish to awaken we will need to: 
 
1.  Question our assessments.
2.  Consider how our assessments would look from another angle; for example, the point of view of another, irrespective of what they mean to us.
3.  Extrapolate between several points of view.
4.  Plunge deeper within the core of our psyche (best done as we hold our breath after inhaling) in which we touch upon the impersonal wellspring of our being recurrently emerging from its virtuality. Thus we will have eliminated the personal projection of our psyche upon objective phenomena. This requires the most utterly impersonal detachment, which the sannyasins call Vairagya.
5.  Try to unmask the hoax of our commonplace logic which infers cause to effect sequences in the process of becoming. Try to grasp other causal inferences, for example: (a) emerging from the depths of our being to our personality, then exercising some impact on circumstances; or (b) emerging from the programming of the universe to the "here and now."

Since our psyche carries inexorably the impressions of the universe as interpreted by us, our psyche will now be somehow refurbished. If we forego what the universe or the circumstances of our life mean to us personally, looking outside from inside, we recognize in the appearance of things features that now make sense to an emancipated mind. Moreover, we resonate with the reality of the universe or the realness of physical phenomena. Suddenly everything assumes great clarity; it is as though we had awakened from an illusion. We can now see what the implications are, the issues enacted by the apparent situations.
 
Looking back upon how things looked when in the Nazut focus, we can clearly see how our psyche had masked reality and we had been living with these misassessments taken for granted during our whole past. We have awakened from a hoax! Fancy enjoying freedom from what we erroneously mistook for our self and our plight!
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Malakut: The Celestial Level

Truly enough, we need to be alert on the physical plane in order to deal with our problems and achieve our goals. Yet to be creative, in particular in ourselves, we need to marshal all the resources of our being. For this we need to take stock of our whole being, wholistically (also holistically),  rather than suffice with our commonplace self-image, which is a mere cross-section of the bounty of our many-tiered being.
In the complete unfoldment of human nature is the fulfillment of life's purpose.
						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
If unaware of the immensity of the environmental space, one is not aware of being enclosed in a prison. The moment a person feels that he will no longer remain in prison, the prison bars must break instantly of themselves.
 						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

Hence, this is the reason for drawing our attention to the importance of awakening to vaster and loftier dimensions of our own being. 
We occupy only as much horizon as we are conscious of.  The next world is the same as this; and this world is the same as the next. Only that which is veiled from our eyes, we call the unseen world. We live in the world to which we are awakened, and to the world to which we are not awakened, we are asleep.
 						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Consider two steps: 

1.  Alternately switching the focus of our consciousness from one perspective to another; for example, from reading a book to embracing a panorama; or being highly body-conscious, as in the case of an athlete, mind-conscious, as in the case of a philosopher, or soul-conscious, as in the case of a mystic. 
2.  Extrapolating between several settings of consciousness simultaneously; for example, being aware of our Divine inheritance and, at the same time, of our humanity, or of our perennity together with our transience, or of our celestial identity versus our incarnate status. 

The first step is easier, and is a good preparation for the more difficult second step, towards which we are aiming. In this chapter, we will be exploring the first step, while anticipating the second step, awakening in life (Tawhid) which will be the subject of the final chapter.
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How do we gain awareness of the loftier counterparts of our being? In the previous chapters, we have learned to sense our etheric double and identify with it. It is fluid, almost volatile, fine-textured like gossamer, highly malleable as its configuration responds to our emotional attunements and imaginings. In Chapter Five, on Mithal, attention was drawn to the way our thinking operates when identifying with our etheric counterpart. Instead of interpreting impressions imputed from outside, our thinking is self-generated in a creative way. At this stage we wish to explore how we can gain a sense of our celestial counterpart. No doubt it is elusive; hence our celestial counterpart will require an enhanced sensitivity to discover it.
 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. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Curiously enough, by foraging in pre-conceptual peri-natal memory stored in the deep unconscious, in an effort to retrieve random clues, we may muster some sense of the nature of our celestial counterpart such as it is now. 
The soul in its manifestation on earth is not at all disconnected from the higher spheres. It lives in all spheres, though it is generally conscious only on one plane. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Although it may be defiled by some of the more obnoxious impressions accruing from our society or our own guilt, you will find that it remains in its essence unscathed (as the voice of Caruso within the bad recordings of the time) and can be retrieved in its pristine glory. Yet it is different now from what it was; caution is needed in resorting to memory, since it turns backwards in time. It has gained wisdom through existential experience without losing its innocence and by continually exulting in glorification. In fact innocence, effulgence, and glorification are the keys to the heavenly spheres.
Innocence is a natural condition of the soul and the lack of  innocence is a foreign element which the soul acquires after coming on earth....The light which comes from the soul rises through the heart and manifests in one's smile....That which we see of our Beloved is the beauty displayed before our eyes; whereas that aspect of our Beloved which is not manifest to our eyes is the inner model of that beauty of which our Beloved speaks to us. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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That our celestial effigy should be now both as it was before our birth, yet matured, is paradoxical. It is difficult for our finite minds to reconcile change with the prevalence of perennity. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan distinguishes between the angels who have not yet incarnated and those who return enriched by the experience on the physical plane. These are conditions of the same person; for example, the child that has become a master still has the child present in him/her, although latent, as a warrantee of his/her candidness that enhances authenticity.

What are then, the methods to clinch our heavenly image?

We discover ourselves by spotting outside ourselves that which matches what was always latent unknowingly within ourselves. Earmark in the physical or social environment impressions that spark in us a sense of deja vu, featuring our most idyllic values, even if we fear they may well be utopic. Be awed by the beauty of a multi-hued dawn, by the geometry of crystals and snowflakes, by acts of heroism, of compassion, of love, of dedicated service; by the light in the eyes of a baby; also by the masterpieces of the cultures of our great civilizations, temples, cathedrals, art, music. We find solace in observing that the great accomplishments of humans were sparked by their belief and adherence to their ideal.
There comes a time in one's evolution when every touch of beauty moves the heart to tears; it is at this time that the Beloved of heavens is brought to earth. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we fail to challenge our records, we become sclerosed and close the door to the future. It is our idealism that frees us from the prison of our trite realism. We must succeed in discovering a richer realism than that of the unimaginative as the practical underpinning of our idealism. Hence, the signpost points to investing our faith in the values that give us a feeling of uplift, of splendor, of heroism, of love and compassion, of the sacred.
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. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We come across clues to what we ascribe to the heavens by scanning the earth, if we look out for them. Yet, it is by matching these clues with our aspiration to the celestial dimensions of our own being, those that bespeak the celestial spheres, that may attune us to these spheres which we are seeking to explore. It is a matter of what we value most.
As one evolves, one ceases to look down on earth, but looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.... Souls who have become conscious of the angelic spheres hear the calling of that sphere. 
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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While confirming that our aim is extrapolating between the heavenly and earthly perspectives, we need to free ourselves from the compulsive impact upon our consciousness of the impressions hailing from the earth that are fostered by our attachment to material satisfaction. If we wish to access the heavens, we will have to, as a first step, highlight the heavenly perspective by downplaying the earthly one. 
The more closely a person is drawn to heaven, the more the things of the earth lose their color and taste.... Verily who pursueth the world will inherit the world, but the soul that pursueth God will attain in the end to the presence of God.... The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes.... If you do not rise above the things of this world, they will rise above you.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It will require of us to assess honestly in self-confrontation the value scale determining our motivations. Where in our life's activities do we invest our enthusiasm, our interest? Where does our detachment give us a leeway of freedom from dependence upon circumstances - service versus greed! 
All that produces longing in the heart deprives it of its freedom.... The real proof of one's progress in the spiritual path can be realized by testing in every situation in life how indifferent one is.... Indifference and independence are the two wings that enable the soul to fly. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
These then are the indispensable premises, but what are the methods? We've already learned to shift our identity from material bodiness to our etheric counterpart. Now we work with light. The practices with visualization of light, starting with the physical aura, then light beyond the purview of our senses or instruments, if followed systematically, lead to the state of illumination. Identify with being a being of nonphysical light; recollect having always been a being of light prior to incarnation on Planet Earth.
 As the sunshine from without lightens the whole world, so the sunshine from within, if it were raised up would illuminate the whole life.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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If we tune up our concentration to the point of identifying solely with being a being of nonphysical light, having lost any vestige of your physical body identity, suddenly we realize we have an existence independent of the body, that we can think without the encumbrance of the mind.
The Sufi practices that process whereby he is able to touch that part of life in himself that is not subject to death...Once a person realizes that one can exist without the physical body, one gains a conviction that frees one from earthly conditions.
 						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we succeed in visualizing what it would be like, as Jelaluddin Rumi says, "to see without eyes, hear without ears, walk without feet and fly without wings," 
our prenatal memory will surface and will spark flashes of insight into our present celestial state, even beyond in uncharted zones of our being.
Let your state be similar to that of the dematerialized  spirits of the sublime celestial Assembly.... Then God acquaints them with what corresponds to them in each world by passing through the different worlds.... 
					Ibn 'Arabi
The clue. the condition, is that we let go of our human identity, physical, etheric, and psychic.
Then the spiritual traveler leaves behind in each world that part of himself that corresponds to it. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
A further clue is letting go of our identification with our physical form, rather than simply our physical bodiness, particularly our face. If we achieve this, we are creating conditions favorable to discovering our celestial countenance, which will overwhelm us with consternation.
 Amongst these forms, you will recognize your own likeness.
 								Ibn 'Arabi
At first it seems confusing, not only because, although it does not have a profile, it still sports an expression, but further because it flickers continually according to our attunement, even more rapidly than our etheric body or physical aura. More paradoxically it seems to be featured by several superimposed images, like a hologram highlighted by the focus of our consciousness. 

Modulating the setting of our consciousness, by dint of our attunement, we can highlight the innocence of our early childhood or shift to the tarnishing effect of the darker side of the world. If we find fulfillment in achievement through mastery, we would notice the impression of maturity imprinted upon our celestial countenance, carried upwards at that lofty level to evidence the wisdom we gained due to our experience of life on the planet. We encounter an amazing discovery: the very sacred and immaculate nature of our celestial counterpart, of which we have now become aware, leads us inevitably into exulting and glorifying the Divine splendor now revealed. At this point a breakthrough of insight makes us realize that our act of glorification creates in us the very likeness of the way our glorification translates itself into form, like the music of some composers.
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"Allah al makhluk fi'l 'itiqadat." (God creates Himself [as you] through your prayers.) 
					Hadith
For prayer is a means of causing God who reveals Himself to appear in the form which precisely He reveals by revealing Himself by and to your form...Through the prayer of man, the form of God becomes visible to the active imagination which projects before it the image, whose receptacle is the worshiper's being in the measure of his capacity. 
		Henri Corbin, Creative Imagination According to Ibn 'Arabi
Our soul is blessed with the impression of the glory of  God whenever our lips praise Him. 
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Here we have the clue to ascending to the celestial sphere, not through meditation, but through religious worship, mystical ecstasy.
(Picture of Pir-o-Murshid in original.) Page 42 

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Jabarut: The Ground of Intelligence

Perfect realization can only be gained by passing through all the stages between man - the manifestation - and God - the only Being, knowing and realizing ourselves from the lowest to the highest point of existence, and so accomplishing the heavenly journey.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
By identifying with a more perennial level of our being, our angelic counterpart which is not subject to perishing or decay, we venture into the more advanced modes of thinking. As we shift our identity from our physical body to our etheric shroud, and then to our celestial body of uncreated light, concomitantly we  shift our notion of being the spectator from the "I" that is body-conscious, through the "I" that flowers in creative imaginings, to our celestial "I,"  the spectator in the heavens. This step will eventually lead to the next state of awakening (Jabarut) in which, by dint of a radical reversal from our personal perspective, we see things from the Divine (transcendent) perspective.

The key to this is eschewing or downplaying any knowledge gained by experience and highlighting a kind of inborn, inherent knowledge reminisced from prenatal memory, or access from peri-natal levels of awareness. This is where both the ascetic's detachment and the lover's yearning for the sublime prove crucial.
The one who lives in one's mind is conscious of the mind; the one who lives in one's soul is conscious of the soul.
 							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
You thought that you were the spectator, the witness of what you experience, but the real witness in you is your angelic counterpart - the witness in the heavens.
 				Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi, Hikmat al Ishraq

Here we are skirting the transit from individuality to the Oneness.
To know one's own archetypal essence is to know one's angel, that is to see one's eternal individuality as it results from the revelation of the Divine Being revealing Himself through Himself. 
						 	Henri Corbin 
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 Modes of Consciousness 

Let us now summarize the stages we have gone through thus far:

First, when we identified ourselves with our physical body (Nazut), we were programmed in our commonplace thinking (Khayal) and took for granted that our personal subjective "I" was the spectator of what we perceived and experienced. All that we could grasp of what we ascribe to God were the clues, the signs in the physical scene and scenario of our lives of what was trying to transpire through that which appeared. If we permutate the terms of this perspective, then it is God revealing Him/Herself through that projection of Him/Herself that is this magnificent bountiful universe.

Second, when turning within, feeling like gossamer, (the Arwah level) we reconnoitered thoughts emerging from within, impromptu, bespeaking  the way the universe unfurls as our personal idiosyncrasies. We were picking up those clues or signs within our own selves (the mode of cognizance called Mithal). 

We noticed that our notion of being the spectator had changed. For one thing: we saw ourseslves as both the spectator and the object experienced (taijasa in the Mandukya Upanishad). Furthermore we may have envisioned our eyes as being the "eyes through which God sees."
Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God; not by thyself. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
Therefore if once more we reverse the perspective, then it now appears to us that God is discovering Him/Herself through our discovering His/Her nature exemplified as our idiosyncrasies.
The second degree of the Sufi is knowing yourself through the knowledge that God has of Himself through you.
					Ibn 'Arabi 

Third, we hoisted our notion of ourselves from the physical or etheric levels to the celestial level (Malakut).  We did this in four steps:

1. Offsetting our body and also etheric consciousness.
2. Shifting the field of our thinking from the physical world and our emergent thoughts which translate emotions into images, into grasping God irrespective of the clues whereby He discloses Him/Herself.
Wipe away the phantasmagoria of images, then Haqq (reality) will emerge from inside. 	
Jami 
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Absorb yourself in the dhikr until the imaginary world escapes you and the abstract thoughts manifest to view. Eventually the one who is invoked will disclose Himself beyond the signs...Then thou understandeth that thou knowest God by God; not by thyself.

Ibn 'Arabi
3.  Bridging the gap between our being the experiencing subject and the object, which may be a thought or emotion, further than in the Mithal mode. Instead of thinking, "I am the eyes through which God sees," think "my glance is the divine glance that has gotten funneled down and therefore limited, maybe distorted."
 
4.  Letting go of the memory of the past and prefiguration of the future, which are both of a finite nature, to identify with our celestial being. When we meditate, we are assailed with random thoughts. These are constituted by the regurgitation of experiences of the physical and social environment in the process of digestion of the psyche. They are remnants of the past. We may also be pondering our future projects, taking into account both the advantage, and the fear of failure. At the Malakut level, our being seems perennial and therefore not inveigled in the process of becoming. We have a sense of having transcended the passage of time which now revolves in the twilight of our consciousness but cannot reach us unless we turn the headlamp of our consciousness towards it, thus slipping back into the commonplace perspective.


 Modes of Cognizance 

Before proceeding, let us compare the modes of cognizance encountered so far.

1.	 We recognize the first, elementary mode, ordinarily taken for granted:    (a) we assume we are the subject, and the world or the circumstances are the object; (b) the world seems to be composed of discrete entities, occupying different locations in space; (c) we infer an effect from a cause in a time sequence; and (d) we interpret situations as assessed from the vantage point of what we assume is our consciousness which is the focalization of an overall universal consciousness which we may call God's consciousness. It is clear that this perfunctory way of thinking is limited and therefore could not possibly give an exhaustive opinion about our problems.

2.  As we readily wallow in ponderous thoughts about ourselves, revolving around a fictitious self-image with which we identify, we are touching upon the personal dimension which we project upon the outer world. It eschews logic. We must avoid confining our thinking to the commonplace mode we described earlier. 
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     As seen in Chapter Five on Mithal, we can reconcile the irreconcilable and gauge complementarity. We can see both sides of a problem. We can envision ourselves as a continuity in change. We can grasp the connectivity between situations that do not seem to be related in time and space or in a causal sequence, what would seem ordinarily like unpredictable coincidences. Everything seems to be inter-meshed in a way that defies our ordinary sense of space:
The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order. 				
David Bohm
     This mode of cognizance could be described through the holistic paradigm illustrated by the holograph:
Each part of the holograph is an image of the whole object. It is a kind of knowledge which is not point to point correspondence ....Therefore every part contains information about the whole object...information about the whole is enfolded in each part of the image.
We cannot possibly describe in detail more than a very small part of the significance that we sense at a given moment.... Deeper intentions generally arise out of the total significance in ways of which one is not aware, and over which one has little or no control ("I didn't mean to do that").
David Bohm 

    We call this intuitive thinking as opposed to common sense. Our intentions actualizing in our motivations hail from this nebulous mind-field which Polanyi calls "tacit knowledge."
		 						
3. In the mode which we are now exploring, we can detect the limitations of ordinary logic. Even in our subjective way of projecting how we feel into irrational ways of thinking that may prove creative, we can see how easily we may be caught in a perspective that locked us into a logical framework. 

As we hoist ourselves into transcendent levels in our meditations, we discover that at each level there is an underpinning, the subtle body of uncreated light, getting subtler and more elusive as we rise. We notice our sense of being the spectator becomes less and less personal; therefore one ascribes it to Divine consciousness). 
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Also we discern a different mode of cognizance,  a more transcendent logic. In A New Model of the Universe  and Tertium Organum (1928), Ouspensky announced a super-logic:
Our ordinary logic helps us to gauge only the relations existing in the phenomenal world.
							P. D. Ouspensky
While it is often taken for granted that body consciousness stands in the way of the realization of the soul, if we shift our sense of bodiness into the subtler non-substantial textures, we find our sense of being a celestial body does not stand in the way of the sublime understanding encountered at this level. In fact, we find that our bodiness and consciousness are mutual expressions of each other. 
The soma and significance are two aspects of one overall reality.... If you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind. 
 David Bohm
Mind and body are two poles of the same reality. Both poles are to be found, no matter how we fragment the totality.
...every part sustains a superposition of north and south poles.
David Bohm
This holds good for the finer counterparts of our being. If we identify with subtler levels of our being, we have the impression of awakening from the mind bind encountered at the grosser levels into the free outlook of realization.
What is manifest on one level may be subtler on another. Therefore the relatively subtle somatic form of thought may have a meaning that can be grasped in still higher and more subtle somatic processes. And this may lead one further to a grasp of a vast totality of meanings in a flash of insight.... This sort of action may be described as the apprehension of the meaning of meanings which may, in principle, go on in indefinitely deep and subtle levels of significance.
David Bohm 
Let us see how the insight gained at this level of meditation applies to our assessment of our problems. 
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1.  At first, we were projecting our own personal psychological  bias upon the situation, judging our problems and people generally within the limits of this perspective.
2.  Then we were seeing how everything is interconnected and the extent to which our own idiosyncrasies and free incentives are involved. By discovering our own potentials, enhancing our own creativity, we could apply our realization upon the situation.
3.  Now we can envision how the situation looks from a transcendental point of view, what the cosmic issues are that are enacted here, customized as it were in our particular '"storms in our teacups."

To summarize: we saw a reason, then a reason behind that reason, encompassing it. Now, freeing ourselves from the mind bind confining us to the reasons we had previously entertained, we grasp reasons beyond reasons or significances beyond significances in infinite regress. 
Ecstasy comes from touching the reason of reasons and by realizing the essence of wisdom. 				
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Lahut: The Archetypal Level

As we know, perhaps the main thrust in Pir-o-Murshid's teaching is gaining awareness of our Divine inheritance which he calls the seed of our personality. In Sufism it is called Lahutiya. 
The one who is conscious of one's earthly origin is an earthly person, one who is conscious of one's heavenly origin is the child of God. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

As soon as we do this, we discover the bounty of what the Sufis call the divine names, asma ilahi. For the Sufis, the word "names," the sound of the wazifa, carries a particular significance because we are talking of the divine language. This is also true in Hinduism, nama rupa.. Each object has its specific signature tune.  Each object is the configuration of a composition of vibrations which we perceive as sound. We try to reproduce these sounds in our mantrams or wazaif.
Then God makes him journey through his Names [that is His archetypes] in order to show him His signs. Thus the server comes to know that he is designed by every name. It is through these names that God appears to the server. 
Ibn'Arabi 
We have noticed that the Sufis distinguish different kinds of signs, ayat, through which God reveals something of Him/Herself by means of clues. The first one in alam al Nazut was through the forms of the world; the second in Arwah, by dint of that which transpires through our nature or the divine nature. Now at the Lahut level, after passing though the Jabarut state where we forego our conscious act to give vent to the divine point of view, the divine nature is revealed directly, notwithstanding any signs that might have been culled in our personality.

We remember that the forms of the world and the idiosyncrasies of our personality were signs, clues as to the formless Reality. Now that any vestige of forms has faded away, it is the Divine attributes, which the Sufis call the Divine names, namely the archetypes of which our idiosyncrasies are exemplars, that reveal themselves. 
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Is it possible, realistic, to see things from the Divine vantage point? Let us remember that we are describing here a very advanced level that can only be reached after experiencing the previous ones leading up to it. It is that transit that we need to look into. At some point, Ibn'Arabi said, we only know the archetype through the exemplar. What meaning does roundness have for us if not through round objects? Our minds extrapolate between the experience we have of the round objects experienced. Somehow when we see a round object, what is common between all the round objects we have previously perceived is subsumed; that is what we mean by the archetype. The question is, could we have any notion of roundness without having experienced round objects? It may well be that it is just because roundness is written into the software of our minds that we recognize roundness in objects. But how can we reach it? What do the divine attributes mean to us? This is the complementary way of grasping the attribute in the divine mind. Such is the significance of a method used by an early church father, Tauler, which proved invaluable to Martin Luther. It is called significatio passiva.

In the presence of the Psalm In Justitia Tua, libera me (may Thy attribute of Justice liberate me), Luther experienced a movement of revolt and despair. What can there be in common between this attribute of justice and my deliverance?  Such was his state until the young Luther perceived in a sudden flash that his attribute must be understood in its significatio passiva, that is to say, Thy justice whereby we are made into just men, Thy holiness whereby we are hallowed. Similarly, in the mystic theosophy of Ibn'Arabi, the divine attributes are qualifications that we impute to the Divine essence as we experience them in ourselves. 

To grasp the Divine archetypes, Martin Luther was extrapolating between the two poles of the same reality, the archetype and the exemplar, which is what one does at the Malakut level.
Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithl) in the higher world. The forms in the higher world preserve the existence of their likeness in the lower worlds. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each form to its likeness.... These are like ladders for the angels, while the meanings that descend in these tenuities are like angels. 		
Ibn'Arabi
This realization establishes a new mode of relationship between God and the creature, or sentient being. The two poles of the same reality are the nature of the relationship between the lord and the vassal originating in the Iranian chivalry, called futuwwat.

The Divinity seeks for a being whose God it is. The Divine sovereignty has a secret and that is thou. 	
Sahl Tostari
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We establish God's sovereignty by our recognition of our divine office which facilitates God's manifestation of His/Her qualities, sifat.
 Each manifest being is the form of a lordly Name "ism rabbani."  The Rabb becomes a reality in relationship with a being who is designated in the passive form.
Henri Corbin
The Divine suzerainty has a secret (sirr robbubiya) and that is thou. 
				Sahl Tostari
By actuating the divine nature in my personality, I confer upon God a mode of existence. 	
							Ibn'Arabi
However, if we have reached the perspective of the Lahut level, we proceed more radically. We capture directly the seeds of those qualities we inherit irrespective of what we have made of them in our personality. This is so that in the Tawhid we will be able to customize them in our personality in a new dis-pensation while disintegrating our previous personality rather than adapting it, which could be a compromise. 

There is no way we can gain a clue as to the magnificence vested in our Divine inheritance, or even of what it is, unless we reverse our vantage point and look at things from the Divine point of view. This is indeed the main objective of Sufism. To achieve this, we need to let go of our personal self-image, which is an outgrowth of what we really are. If we cease identifying with it, it will dissolve, giving way to a fresh dispensation from the seed which is our Divine inheritance.
 Oh God! Do away with my Nasutiyat [human idiosyncrasies] so that Thy Lahutiyat may replace it. 
Al  Hallaj
The soul acquires only those qualities in which it is interested, and the soul keeps only those attributes in which it is interested. However many undesirable attributes a person may have, one can lose them all if one does not approve of them.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Here at this level, we are overwhelmed by the inexhaustible bounty of possibilities of which so little ever materializes at the existential level. It is sometimes called by the Sufis the level of possibilities, imkan. (Buddha refers to this level in the arupa, meditations beyond form which he encountered on the way to illumination. In Islam, it is the treasury.)
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There is no thing whose treasuries are not with Us. 	
			Qur'an 15-21 
I am not authorized to give you the key to the divine treasury. You have to discover it yourself. 
								Niffari 

For clarity's sake, let us recall that at the Arwah level, we were facilitating the unfurling of the potentials of our being in the process of becoming. Here, at the Lahut level, since our notion of time as an arrow has collapsed, we are experiencing conditions that favor our being aware of the immortal dimension of our being. The Sufis refer to a different causal chain than Laplacian determinism; they are talking of what one might call a horizontal chain of cause and effect.
When one says that the Truth most glorious comprehends all beings, the meaning is that He comprehends them as a cause comprehends its consequences, not that He is a whole containing them as His parts....
 							Jami 
 In our meditations, if we can let go of our personal identity, and reverse our consciousness so that instead of looking for God as the object of our cognizance, we try to open ourselves to God's revealing His/Her vision in pre-eternity, Azaliat, irrespective of ourselves in our temporary state, we will find ourselves in sync with the following perspective of al Hallaj, who left an unforgettable testimony of what was revealed to him in a meditation:
In His Self He contemplated in His pre-eternity (Azaliayat) all the invisible.... This is the original state in the absence of all creatures, of all qualities.... Then He entertained a dialogue through a thought, by means of all His thoughts. He conversed with Himself. Then He contemplated Himself in the attribute of love, because in its essence, the essence of all essences is love. Then He contemplated in His attribute of love all the other attributes of His Being. Then He glorified Himself in Himself.... He looked into pre-eternity and created a picture. This picture is His picture, the picture of His essence. And when God beholds anything, He creates His picture in it for all eternity.... Then He saluted it and congratulated it for its splendid countenance.
 							al Hallaj 

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Hahut: Unity

In my ascent, I first integrated the objects or thoughts experienced in the world into a vision of the universe as one being I called God. Then I shifted my notion of being myself, the knowing subject shahid, to the one and only Witness. Now as I  by-pass the al's and la's and ll's of my recitation by intoning the h of Allah, I reach into the state of paramount Hahut. It is only accessed beyond the existential realm.

As I pronounce the h of the word Allah, not only the experience of the world and my self-awareness fade away, but even the memory of these. 
Every time you consider a thing, He will have already escaped you. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
The h of Allah represents the shift from my sense of being the subject (the knower) to the takeover of God as the Knower (the Super-eminent Subject).  But where there is a knowing subject, even if singular, it follows that there is a known.  This is dichotomy; consequently, we are still at the level of duality.  When the h is transformed into the hu, however, I am hoisted beyond multiplicity into unity.

The letter "h" is the symbol of something that is absent.
It stands for the state of non-manifestation of the pure essence.
					Ibn'Arabi
Paradoxically, even the void, in which I thought I lost myself in the illa, opens the way to the ultimate reality. Even though I cannot experience it, this is self-revealing.  Now the perspective of the qualities, at the Lahut level, fades away as I pull myself away from even the slightest spur of the seeds of the existential state.
The real Being is only and exclusively God in His essence (dhat) and principle (ayn); not under the aspect of His names....In  the station of unity, touching upon the unity, one accesses the supreme knowledge whereby the grasp of the qualities falls away; indeed the qualities cannot add anything to the essence.... If  the names disappeared, the Named One would appear. The one who is immersed in the vision of multiplicity is in the world in the aspect of the Divine names and the names of the world; and the one who is immersed in the Unity is with God in the grasp of this unity irrespective of the worlds.
				Ibn'Arabi
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Do not confuse the perfection of the manifestation through exist-ence, where the essence is individuated (like the manifestation of the Totality in the parts), with the manifestation of the essence to itself, in itself and for itself.  
					Jami

I realize that since any sense of being the observer is vanishing, the only way in which cognizance can take place at this level is by dint of the fact that my mind is homologous to the mind of the universe, albeit customized and thereby less effective, on the holographic model. Any remnant of my sense of individual identity limits the vastness and splendor of the thinking of the universe, shattering my faltering mind.
Knowledge is a veil upon the known.  
				Ibn 'Arabi

In Yoga, we would say that Bodhi has been resorbed into its ground, Purusha.

What is more, we cannot say that we are experiencing fana, because we are not conscious of being the experiencing subject. This is called fana al fana. We are not aware of not being aware.
To be conscious of annihilation is incompatible with annihilation.
				 Jami
Still, something in the depths of our being spells a kind of premonition of death.  It is the Asamprajnata Samadhi of Yoga, parat param or "beyond the beyond."  The word fana assumes its apparently irrevocable meaning. 

Upon reflection, I understand al Hallaj. At the supreme moment, hanging on the cross after the most atrocious tortures, there was no more "I am" left to recite the Shahada, la ilaha illa 'llah-hu. There is a contradiction in affirming the Divine unity if one is aware of oneself as the one affirming it.  Therefore, at this pinnacle of the mystic's acid test, at the collapse of any remnant of one's sense of  "I-ness," any human affirmation is handed over to the supreme and ultimate Divine unifying act.  His last words were:
It suffices if God alone unifies the mystic in His Unity [wahid-wajid].
				al Hallaj
Here lies the difference between Yoga and Sufism.  It is mind-shattering to hear that this crucial and last sentence of al Hallaj was the answer to the impudent question, "what is Sufism?" asked  by his erstwhile presumptive friend, Shibli, while he hung bleeding and agonizing on the cross. Indeed, by dint of trying to reach beyond the edge of their consciousness by isolating themselves from the existential realm, the Sufi mystics lend themselves to the Divine action which resorbs them in the Oneness of God's being.
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I see myself when Thou art not before me; when I see Thee, myself is lost to view.  I consider it good fortune when Thou art alone with me, but when I am not there at all, I think it the greatest blessing.
 				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The subtlety of the language used by the Sufis makes it possible to distinguish different aspects of God. The word Allah originated from the word luh, which means "the One whom I make into the worshipped one by my glorification."  However, God cannot be limited by this aspect of His/Her being that requires the dichotomy of the worshiper and the worshipped one, which I bring forth by my worshipping Him/Her.  Nor can it be restricted to that aspect called Rabb, where, by manifesting the Divine qualities invested in my nature, I confer upon God a mode of existence in/as me.  For the "awakened one," the ultimate reality, called Haqq, by-passing any dichotomy,  takes precedence over these aspects of God.  Whatever we countenance and ascribe to the universe as we whirl, our head is only the projection or the shadow of that aspect of God that is denoted as Haqq.  Therefore the dervish's Dhikr is Haqq la ilaha illa 'llah-hu. Hence al Hallaj's famous exclamation, "Ana'l Haqq" (I am the truth).

A zephyr of perplexity may trouble our spirit. The dervishes evoke this uncanny Divine emotion encountered by the dhakir called hayrah ecstasy, or perhaps beyond ecstasy, sometimes called the consternation of intelligence. 
This cannot be known by reason, nor conceived by thought; only he who has attained Divine intuition savors the pure taste of this total revelation which one calls the "Divine unveiling;" and it is the object of the perplexity, hayrah, of the perfect amongst the initiated. 
				al  Jili
So there is nothing but perplexity upon perplexity.  
				Ibn'Arabi
Be not surprised if God Himself is perplexed!  
			Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

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Tawhid: Awakening the Divinity Within

We confront the crowning enigma of the implications of the awakening attained "beyond the existential level" when we face the critical turning point of real life situations again, without losing sight of that transcendent awakening.  
When one does not see anything other than God, the void (khala) is impossible...for such a being, a retreat (khalwa) is not possible.
  						Ibn 'Arabi
 For the Sufis, in the ascetic's seclusion we would be missing out on the opportunity that life offers, whereby God reveals His being in the measure of our capacity to countenance the clues covertly intimated through the existential realm. We are witnessing a radical reversal of perspective:  granted our objective is to awaken beyond the limited, commonplace, personal vantage point, what point could there be in our incorporation in the fabric of the universe if we alienate ourselves from it? We would be missing out on the purpose of life altogether.
The man who shuts himself away from all men, however highly evolved he may be spiritually, will not be free in the higher spheres.... The man conscious of his duties and obligations to his friends is more righteous than he who sits alone in solitude.
  					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I trigger off the transit into life by espying distant echoes of a remote inflow of what we might call "know-how," featuring the way in which the distillate of existential experiences (wisdom) is being fed back at this lofty level into the programming of the universe. Otherwise, whatever is gained by experience, by the interaction between the fragments of the One Being, would be lost, which wouldn't make sense.

For tonight, the teeming world gives birth to the world everlasting. 
				Jelaluddin Rumi
That which is taxed of finitude will become eternal.  
					Jami
These elusive impressions serve as the chain linking us to an anchor beyond our reach in the "world." But I do not wish to lose my perspective, the awakening gained in the ascent. I distinguish two stages leading to awakening in life: 

1.  Hu manifests as Allah so long as I abstain from trying to experience what is happening, but simply exult in glorification.
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 If the huwa [beyond subjectivity] were apparent, it would not be huwa, but ana [the paramount subject]. 
					Ibn 'Arabi
Huwa manifests as Allah only if I cease to identify with the experiencer [the subject: ana] because the ana stands in the way of this manifestation.   
					Ibn 'Arabi
2.  I regain my sense of being the spectator; then I can only address God as "Thou," anta.
Should the ana outlast while Huwa manifests as Allah, then we have anta (Thou).   
					Ibn 'Arabi
 As I intone Hu, I become aware of the way the realization I attained in the state of Hahut transformed my whole being at all levels, including the configuration of the subtle bodies, then the material body, starting with my celestial shroud and becoming concrete in the descent towards manifestation. Now the challenge consists in maintaining the Divine point of view while recovering my personal identity. 
My contemplation has brought to light the pure essence of  my existence so that I have not found another than myself in my extinction and in my perennity.  
					Ibn 'Arabi
 There is no way we can discover the ultimate reality, Haqq, which is the ultimate condition of God; nevertheless we may be invited to participate in the Divine vision whereby He/She sees that reality projected in the mirror of the universe as in that reflection of His/Her Being that constitutes our personalities. To accede to this mode of cognizance, we need to serve as a mirror, that is, abstain from interposing our reason or our act of consciousness, rather simply allowing our understanding to be transfigured by this unfamiliar way of looking at things. 

Paradoxically, this ineffable reality may be revealed from within the existential perspective, rather than beyond existence, that which is sought in the yogic Samadhis. Therefore, for al Hallaj, the Sufi dervish must abstain from isolating him/herself. Then, absorbed in the Divine unity, he/she is co-opted by the Divine unifying operation to be integrated in His/Her Divinity (infirad, rather than tajrid or tafrid).  L. Gardet defines tajrid as isolation from any objective input, and tafrid as retraction of the self from any act, operated by the self. In contrast, al Hallaj advocates infirad, the passive of the verbal form. 
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It is God who elects him and draws him into His state of  isolation that he may participate in the mystery [of the divine solitude].  
							Gardet
Therefore, now, rather than losing myself, I can see myself inextricably inter-meshed in the total being of which I am clearly an integral element. It is a shattering and, at the same time, overwhelming experience.

At this point, as we intone Huwa, turning our head towards our heart, we are invited to extrapolate between all the perspectives encountered in the course of the whole recitation of the Dhikr. This would mean:

1.  Expanding the outreach of our vantage point.
2.  Seeing the "outside" from "inside." 
3.  Hoisting our consciousness "beyond the beyond." 
4.  Partaking in an overview of the way things appear on Earth. This represents a kind of tour de force, challenging all the views we have encountered so far. In fact it could be defined as stereoscopic consciousness, being able to extrapolate between the perception vouchsafed through our personal vantage point and the transcendental one. How can this be achieved? It is a matter of keeping constantly in mind our connection with the totality of which we are a part, while acquiescing that we have gained some kind of relative autonomy as a visitor on planet Earth.
True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.  
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Tracing back the stages I passed through in the ascent, I avail myself once more of the creativity of my imaginative faculty:
Imagination causes archetypal notions to descend into perceptible forms.
  							Ibn 'Arabi
The same data must be recaptured at each of the degrees of being, or levels through which they had to descend in order to reach the mode of being corresponding to the plane on which they are evident to our ordinary consciousness.  
						Henri Corbin
Moreover, we continually need to keep ourselves highly attuned by offsetting our consciousness so as to grasp the splendor that is striving to transpire behind the sometimes offensive appearance of things.
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There comes a time in one's evolution when every touch of beauty moves the heart to tears; it is at that time that the Beloved of heavens is brought to Earth.  
					Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Note that as we hoisted our concentration from la ilaha to illa, we shifted our awareness from the perceptual and interpretive mode to grasping the emergence of the world and ourselves from the implicate state. Then, when we hoisted our consciousness from illa to 'llah, we shifted from the world of metaphor to thoughts bereft of any form or image whatsoever. Now, as we intone hu, we descend into the realm of configurations and matter. Our intelligence discovers itself by awakening in the atoms of the cells of our bodies.
Thoughts shift from the perception of the senses to the imaginary ones; then the intelligible thoughts will descend upon you in the form of perceptions.  
					Ibn 'Arabi
You will observe the engendering of the possibilities lying in the spiritual plane into the corporeal world.  
					Ibn 'Arabi
Let us now see how this attunement and perspective is going to effect our daily lives. Passing though the stages of the Dhikr, we have not only been discovering unfamiliar perspectives, beaming new light upon our problems, but awakening dormant faculties. The shift in outlook triggers off transformation. Let us now consciously awaken the innumerable faculties governing the programming of the whole universe that are dormant in ourselves.
In man is awakened that spirit by which the whole universe was created. 
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Realization needs to be backed up by doing:
In order to gain God consciousness, the first condition is to make God a reality, so that He no longer is an imagination.... At present there exists only in the world a belief in God; God exists in the imagination. It is such a soul, which has touched upon divine perfection, that brings to earth a living God, who without him would remain on in the heavens.... If there is any sign of God to be seen, it is in the God-conscious one.  
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The clue consists in experiencing God discovering Him/Herself as ourselves.
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How is higher consciousness attained? By closing our eyes to our limited self and by opening our heart to the God who is all perfection, who is in heaven and on earth, within and without, who is visible, audible, perceptible, intelligible and yet beyond man's comprehension.... The key to spiritual attainment is to be conscious of the Perfect One who is formed in the heart. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Sufi's task is to be instrumental to God's purpose in the very creation of the world. Here lies the secret of the Hadith Qudsi that lies at the basis of all Sufism: 
"I was hidden treasure...."
Divinity resides in humanity. It is also the outcome of  humanity. Divinity is to God what the drop is to the ocean: the drop is of the same nature as the ocean, but in comparison it is only a drop. 
				Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man. And this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents the master, that is, God Himself. It is in man that the Divine perfection can be seen. God knows Himself through His manifestation. Manifestation is the self of God, but a self that is limited, a self that makes His perfection known to Himself when He compares Himself with the limited self we call nature. Therefore, the purpose of the whole creation is the realization that God gains by discovering His own perfection through our imperfection.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The key is - rather than thinking of God as other - discovering the various levels of Godness in ourselves.
The soul of every individual is God, but man has a mind and a body which contains God according to the accommodation.  
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
How do we reconcile this with the thought which led us to the Hahut or Samadhi state: "Work through the ties with the life of the world?"  Having loosened these, we are able to reconcile what would seem like the irreconcilable, involve ourselves with unconditional love with all beings, while not being dependent upon attachment or gain.
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The way of those who renounce is to know all things, to admire all things, to get all things, but give all things and to think that nothing belongs to them and that they own nothing. He who arrives at the state of indifference without experiencing interest in life is incomplete and apt to be tempted by interest at any moment; but he who arrives at the state of indifference by going through interest really attains the blessed state. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 Here lies the enigma:
Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a phenomenon of interest. All this world that man has made, where has it come from? It has come from the power of interest. The whole creation and all that is in it are the products of the Creator's interest. But at the same time, the power of indifference is a greater one still, because, although motive has a power, yet at the same time motive limits power. Yet it is motive that gives man the power to accomplish things. On the other hand, so long as a man has a longing to obtain any particular object, he cannot go further than that object. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
(blank in original) Page 62
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Synopsis: Dhikr

A = Subject/Object perspective.  
L =  Identity: body, psyche subtle and celestial bodies (according to level of identity).
I  = Personal subject, witness.
H = Ultimate reality. 
U = The aspect of God actuated as the existential reality. 

 
 La 
We experience reality-biased projection of psyche (L > psyche, A > reality as existential).

 ilaha 
The subject realizes the delusion (the first step towards awakening). The witness (I) is extended, grasping reality (A) from an all-encompassing span. The representation that the psyche (L) carried of reality is now replaced by an objective one. But to be germane, the new representation of reality (the second A) needs to be adumbrated by the divine point of view (H).

 illa 
The witness in us (I) is looking within. Of necessity our identity shifts from the first (L), our physical body (Nazut), to the second (L), our subtle body (Arwah, in Yoga, tanmatra). Concomitantly from our psyche (Khayal), to a new mode of thinking (Mithal) we project the reality we discover internally (Arwah) and now identify with. Reality is now offset from the time/space frame of ordinary experience and seems to flow recurrently into the way it transpires in the physical world and also as our psyche. We grasp the physical world (A) "from inside-out" dynamically instead of statically. That is, instead of simply ingesting the input from the physical and social environment, interpreted and assessed by conditioned assumptions, we can envision it (A) unfolding from its seedbed, like a plant releasing the genes that were previously turned virtual. By the same token, we can envision these potentials unfurling as the idiosyncrasies of our personality. The creative thrust of the universe in us fosters the genesis of form (physical or idiosyncratic) from subliminal patterns of energy. This materializes as matter (the physical body, Nazut) or subtle matter (the subtle body, Arwah) or at the level of thinking as the psyche (Khayal), or the creative mind (at the level of metaphor, Mithal).
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 'llah 
Since creativity integrates the different modes of reality (which vary from one level to another), we now realize that the creativity materializing as us, while emerging from within, includes patterns hailing from all levels. Our consciousness is now hoisted from that unsounded first a of the word Allah. It represented our grasp of reality emerging from within (Mithal) to the second a of the word Allah, which represents reality at the archetypal level (Lahut). To reach the perspective grasped at the (Lahut) level, we need to let go of our previous identification with our etheric body (Arwah) and shift our identity to our celestial effigy (Malakut, which is like a countenance without substance), represented by the first l of the word Allah. Next, we shift our identity to identifying with being pure intelligence beyond form, time and space (Jabarut), represented by the second l  of the word Allah. 

 h 
When intonating the h  of the word Allah, we leave not only the existential world out of focus, but even the programming behind it, to touch upon the reality that it unfolds and actuates. 

 hu 
The u of hu indicates the descent through the spheres. We would be discounting all that is gained by the interfacing and osmosis fostered at the existential level if we did not awaken in the perspective of the world while extrapolating it with the perspectives encountered at each of the levels explored in the entire Dhikr.

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Synopsis:  Fana-Baqa



 Nazut 

Annihilation (absorption) of the subject (psyche) in the object (God manifesting as the cosmos)

fana bi'l madhhur 'an al dhakir

I espy God through perceptual clues.

God reveals His/Her nature through clues in the cosmos.


 Khayal 

Annihilation (resorption) of the object (cosmos) in the subject (psyche)

fana bil dhakir 'an al madhhur

I espy God through clues in my idiosyncrasies.

God reveals His/Her nature through clues in my personality.


 Arwah 

Annihilation (dissolution) of the object (God revealing Him/Herself as our psyche) in (the furtherance of) the act (discovery of the seed of our psyche)
 
fana bi'l Dhikr 'an al madhkur

I know myself through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through me.

God knows Him/Herself through the knowledge that I have of Him/Her.

 Mithal 

Annihilation (deployment) of the act (imagination, seed) in (the furtherance of) the object (psyche)

fana bi'l madhkur 'an al Dhikr
I espy God brainstorming through my creative imagination.

God reveals His/Her nature to me as it evolves by dint of my creative imagination.
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 Malakut 

Annihilation (dissolution) of the subject (spectator) in the (prevalence of the divine existentating) act

fana bi'l dhikr 'an al dhahr

God knows me through the knowledge that I have of Him/Her at the  celestial level.

I know God through the knowledge that God has of my knowledge of Him/Herself.

 Jabarut 

Annihilation (sublimation) of the (divine existentiating) act in (the prevalence of) the subject (the divine spectator)

fana bi'l dhakir 'an al Dhikr

God reveals to me the knowledge that He/She has of Him/Herself irrespective of the cosmos. 

God knows Him/Herself irrespective of the cosmos.

 Lahut 

The persistence of the object (the Divine programming)

baqa bi'l madhkur

Thanks to my insight into His/Her knowledge of the archetypes (sifat) of His/Her Being, God is moved to bequeath upon me a trans-existential matrix of being, adumbrating my existential inheritance.

By grasping God's auto-contemplation of the archetypes (sifat) of His/Her Being, irrespective of the cosmos,  I make God (originally a virtuality) into a reality through me, in me, as me.

 Hahut 

The persistence of the subject (Divine intelligence)

baqa bi'l dhakir
Page 67
 Tawhid 

The persistence of the act (the Divine being) 

baqa bi'l Dhikr

I see God's intention in the cosmos.

God reveals to me His/Her intention in the cosmos.

(picture of Pir Vilayat in original) Page 68
Page 69


Synopsis:  Modes of Thinking 
Corresponding to Focalization of Consciousness
as Seen in the Perspective of Sufism

Our notion of reality is a function of the setting of our consciousness. We can indeed distinguish several modes of thinking corresponding to the focalization of our consciousness.

1. If we modulate our consciousness to the empirical perspective (Nazut):
a.  We believe we are the spectator.
b.  Reality seems to be composed of objects or particles (discrete building blocks).
c.  We identify with our consciousness, our psyche and our body.
We shall show them the signs at the horizon of themselves 
Qur'an xii, 53J
2.  If we modulate our consciousness to the psychological perspective (Khayal): 
a.  The spectator in us projects its personal perspective upon events.
b.  The object of our cognizance is our psyche or thoughts or those of others.
c.  We identify with our consciousness and our psyche.
Behold the world entirely comprised in your self. The world is man and man is the world. 
				Shabistari, O.F. Whinfield, 1880, p. 15

3.  If we modulate our consciousness to the introspective perspective (Arwah)
a.  We identify with our life field (subtle body or electromagnetic field).
b.  We adopt a holistic vision of the world; everything intersperses and is interrelated with everything else.
c.  Our notion of being the spectator intermeshes with that of others, eventually an undifferentiated cosmic consciousness.
d.  We become more aware of our implicit mode of thinking rather than analytical.
The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order.      
					David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 13
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The one who tunes himself not only to the external but to the inner being and to the essence of all things, gets an insight into the essence of the whole being; and therefore he can, to the same extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty of the flower. 
		Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Music and Sound, The Music of the Spheres

4.	If we modulate our consciousness to the imaginative  (or ideational) perspective (Mithal):
a.  Our consciousness is not receptive, (or perceptive), but configures ideas into images in our psyche.
b.  We discover potentialities dormant in our psyche.
c.  We identify with a dynamic self-generating self-image.
d.  We participate volitionally in the unfurling of these as idiosyncrasies.
e.  Our imaginary faculty represents to itself the elusive forms of our subtle body.
f.   This is our personal participation in the recurrent creativity of reality at the existential level.
So what the soul shows to itself is precisely its own image, since the earth is a being, it reflects the image premeditated bythe soul.
							Henri Corbin, 1977, p. 76
5.	If we carry our memory back into peri-natal states (Malakut):
a.  Our sense of identity straddles our identification with our psyche in the process of  becoming intermeshed with our extra-terrestrial self-image.
b.  We lose our sense of location in space.
c.  We are able to envision ourselves as a continuity in change. We see ourselves both (relatively) external and transient.
d.  We are able to extrapolate in our self-image between the sublime and the defiled features of our nature, both psychic and the configuration of our aura.
As man evolves, he ceases to look down on earth, but looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking. 
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Prophets and Religions, The Sun Concept of God
The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through its ties of the lower planes 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Metaphysics, Our Constitution, The Soul  Itself Alone












Ecstasy of Light

by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

Inspired by the Teaching of
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Copyright (c) 1997  Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
All rights reserved


First Edition, July 1997

The material in this volume was drawn from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in February and March, 1997, at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York;  Seattle, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona. This material focuses on advanced practices of light and is a continuation of the previous volume, Light Upon Light. Certain practices thoroughly explained in the first volume are not detailed in this volume. Ecstasy of Light is most appropriate for those who are familiar with the concept of light practices and meditations. 

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Jyoti Jessica McLachlan and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 



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The Ecstasy of Light


There are two catch words in the spiritual realm:  one is awakening and the other is illumination.  What do they mean in terms of experience?  The only way to know it is to experience it.  Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says that as we evolve, passion is awakened in us for the unattainable.  That is awakening, but illumination would be a passion for light.  
Passion is but another form of love.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
These meditations on light are the most tangible and also give us a sense of who we are, because finally we discover we are beings of light.  We discover the whole universe is really the crystallization of the Big Bang, which was an outburst of light.  Pir-o-Murshid says the consciousness which has been buried for eons of time in matter awakens within matter.  The consciousness of light can awaken in our body and that is what is called illumination.

We want to take advantage of this rare opportunity to experience what we are talking about.  That means developing the skills that will trigger off a revealing experience.  To start with, I would like to contrast the light our bodies absorb from the environment with the light that emerges from within, and then engages as our aura. 

 Sources of Light 

There are two different sources of light.  One is external and the other is internal.  We are talking for the moment about physical light and different levels of light.  The first step would be simply to become aware of the condition of the cells of our bodies that absorbs light from the stars and galaxies, cosmic rays, neutrinos, and from the whole ocean of light of the universe.  Think of your body as a crystal that is absorbing light, which is exactly what crystals do.  It is not just refracting or reflecting light; the electrons within the atoms themselves are modified by the intake of light.  Imagine that something happens to your body by the sheer fact that you are absorbing light.  It is mind over matter.  If you are conscious of what it does to the cells of your body, if you are conscious of the cells of your body beginning to jiggle and sparkle and radiate, fluoresce, then it will become a transforming experience.

As you inhale, just imagine you are immersed in the ocean of the light of the universe and experience the ecstasy of light, the ecstasy of communing with light. Discover yourself as a being of light, as the crystal and the light, and the way the crystal is transformed by the light.  Hold your breath and just experience the effervescence in the cells of your body.  They begin to jiggle, sparkle, fluoresce.  They divide faster than they would ordinarily because they are availing themselves of this energy because light is energy.  They are feeding themselves with light and consequently what happens is mitosis; the division of the cells is increased tremendously and it has a therapeutic effect.  This occurs if you can actually visualize the cells of your body and you can also visualize the atoms and molecules.    
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I find it helpful to have a very clear sense of what is happening because that will increase the effectiveness of the impact of light on your body. You can literally feel the jiggling of the cells of your body.  Each cell is endowed with a kind of minimal consciousness and one is awakening that consciousness by arousing the cell from a state of relative lethargy by the impact of light.  You might even reach a point when you are aware that the cells are communicating by sending light messages to each other in a telegraphy of light.        

We think things that are close to each other influence each other, like a magnet and metal filings, but in physics we find that impact does not need to depend upon location in space.  The consequence is that what's happening to cells of your body has some influence in what's happening in the universe.  The cells of your body are in some way communicating with the galaxies and the stars.  This is really breathtaking.  You could even experience the joy of the cells, a bodily joy, as they awaken from semi-lethargy by absorbing a fresh dispensation of energy from the ocean of light.  This has a redeeming effect when one is suffering from bodily ailments.  For example, there was a lady who was practically beaten to death in a concentration camp and had lost her sight, and yet when I spoke with her she was smiling at me, and so there is some way of overcoming physical pain.  That also applies to the pain of the psyche by the sheer exultation of discovering ourselves as a being of light who cannot be tarnished.  It can be clouded, but never really tarnished.  

Now as you exhale and radiate light, you can achieve mind over body.  It's more than just visualizing a zone of light around your body.  The photons are hurtling through space at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, extending out to the stars and forming a wave interference pattern with the light of the universe.  If you can visualize that, you will become more and more luminous.  
Out of space there arose light, and by that light space became illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The converse would be converging light that emerges from within as you inhale, and then radiating it out as you exhale.  This is the second sort of light that we rarely think about, and the best way to enhance this new dispensation of emerging light is to think of a white hole in outer space.  It's one of the views of astrophysicists.  The world we're ordinarily conscious of only represents a three dimensional cross section of a multidimensional universe.  For example, an animal that could only extrapolate between two dimensions of space would be living in a kind of two dimensional space, like, for example a sheet of paper, and whatever crosses that sheet of paper would appear as being something on that piece of paper.     

There is atrophy in the universe, waste.  The energy gets disintegrated at the jagged ends, just like the flower that fades.  The outer petals start fading, but then to counteract that atrophy a new energy emerges from within.  That is called a white hole, instead of a black hole.  Of course there is a two-way movement; on one hand we are drawn into the void - the black hole - and on the other hand we rise anew from the void and don't know what is happening below the threshold of consciousness.  
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Think of your solar plexus now as a white hole.  As you inhale try to sense the light that emerges.  It is what Pir-o-Murshid calls all-pervading light, in contrast with radiant light.  In our minds we think light is radiant, that it radiates from a source, because we think locally.  We think in the explicate perspective ordinarily, but in meditation we have to learn to think in the implicate mode.  Everything is intermeshed with everything else, like in a web.  If we think that way, we can have some sense of light that does not emanate from a source, but that is widespread, all-pervading, the implicate state of light.  A good example of this would be radio waves that are processed in our radios so we can make sense of them; as they are in themselves, we would never be able to make sense of them.  This light is not something we can perceive, but we do exactly what the radio does.  We somehow process that light so as to make it radiant.  As you exhale, think that you are radiating that energy that emerged in its implicate condition.  You're converging it and radiating it. 
Thou changest thy place, but not thyself, O Light.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now as you inhale you're converging that light as it's drawn into a center, the solar plexus, and as you exhale you radiate it from your heart center because those two chakras are deeply connected.  That light then accrues to the light we boomerang from the environment, from the stars, although actually what we converge is the light that is subliminal to the light we perceive from the stars.  Now it's a little more difficult to hold your breath between inhaling and exhaling.  You can't just turn within, you have to cease thinking of yourself as being the witness, the subject experiencing other than yourself.  It's very difficult because we are so used to thinking of ourselves as the subject, experiencing other than ourselves.  It is only if consciousness is voided of its content, that means of the perception of an object, that consciousness peters out.  As Buddha says, the consciousness is like a flame.  As long as there is a log of wood, the flame passes from one log to the other, but if there is no more fuel, then of course the fire peters out.  

Think of consciousness as being dependent upon perception, and as we turn within we have drawn ourselves away from perception and consequently we can't use the word experience any more.  We are talking about resonance or communion.  It's not experience, it's revelation.
As water in a fountain flows as one stream, but falls in many drops divided by time and space, so are the revelations of the one stream of truth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we can think that way, we really do place a barrier between what was at first our consciousness and what we conceived of as being the external world.  We place an obstacle in the way of our consciousness' ability to perceive other than itself.  I said that consciousness peters out, but what Pir-o-Murshid says is probably more accurate, and that is that consciousness turns within.  Be careful of that term, because you are not the perceiver any more.  Don't try to experience; let the state of reality be revealed to you.  
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If you try to experience, then you are standing in the way.  We can avail ourselves of skills in meditation in order to trigger off realization.  The practice Sufis call Shaghal and Hindus call Yoni Mudra is a very useful tool to get some sense of the all-pervading light.  Try that now.
A diamond must be cut before its light can shine out.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Concentrate on your solar plexus.  Turn your eyeballs upward, but be very careful not to press your index fingers on your cornea, which means of course the retina.  You can't perceive the inner light, or if you do, it's purely an optical illusion.  It's really more like identifying with this foundation of your aura, in the realm of all-pervading light.  Instead of perceiving that light, discover that you are that all-pervading light of the universe that is continually being focused in a center, and is radiating from there.  

Do three breaths, then take your hands away.  You can continue to be aware of your breathing in and then definitely hold your breath; now exhale.  This is the real breakthrough in our realization because there's no boundary between ourselves as beings of light, and the infinite cosmic ground of ourselves as beings of light.  It's like a pyramid, for example.  There's no point at which the individuality separates from its ground.  That's what we experience as we hold our breath.  

Now as you exhale be aware of the consistency in the auric zone of light surrounding the body.  It doesn't have a boundary.  Kirlian photography gives a very good idea of this, although what it does is photograph cold emissions of electrons, which is not exactly what we are doing.  Think of the photographs of flowers made by Walter Chappel of Santa Fe, in which you can see that the petals are transparent.  You see one petal behind the other and the petals are surrounded by zones of light that peter out at their edge so they don't have a boundary, but still they do have some kind of configuration.  As you exhale, think of the form of your body, but without a profile.  Try to imagine that. 

We are talking about the architectony of the aura, a rather inert form, that is going to lead us towards raising our consciousness into the higher spheres.  This is an intermediate step, a clue in discovering our real being.  It's relative of course, but now we may be talking about our higher being, our celestial being.  For example, the thing to do is to discover something like the countenance of our face instead of the features of our face; something that is transpiring through that which appears and which does have some kind of structure even though it doesn't have a profile.

One could very easily slip into self-deception if one slips back into the etheric realm, which is the realm of electrons, magnetic fields.  The celestial level is the level of light.  You have to be very aware of the light of your being and the structure is secondary; it's the light that's important.  This is a process of self-revelation; we're discovering ourselves dynamically instead of statically.  The zone of light keeps on altering according to our mood; that's what Walter Chappel found working with flowers.  
Page 5
As you inhale think back to turning within, and the emergence of the subliminal all-pervading light, and then hold your breath.  It's very difficult to define what you're focusing on because you're not the subject any more that is experiencing other than yourself.  As you exhale, you'll find that your ecstasy, the estacsy of light, is going to change the countenance of your aura, which is a reflection of your attunement.  If you're in your very high attunement, it's very beautiful.   Light is always beautiful, but it can be Luciferian, whereas this is heavenly light.  It depends upon your attunement.  This means you have to overcome what Jung calls the shadow: anger, judgmentalism, resentment,  conscupiesence, a lack of charity, cruelty, manipulation, dishonesty, all those things that distort your aura into what one calls the Luciferian light.  It's not perceiving your aura, it's identifying with it.

 Fire into Light 

Now we're going to explore further aspects of the practices of light.  Instead of working with fluorescence, we are going to work with phosphorescence, the ability to transform fire into light.  
The same light which is fire on earth and the sun in the sky, is God in heaven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Humans have lost this ability to some extent.  The cells of our bodies are continually in a state of consumption, incandescence.  The rate of that consumption is evidenced by the temperature of the body.  One can increase that phosphorescence.  For example, fire flies and bats in dark caves and fish in deep water are able to produce light out of their own bodies because they are not able to absorb light from the environment, except ultraviolet light.  That is an ability that is dormant in us, but in many of the yoga practices, we are availing ourselves of that third source of light.  The Tibetans do that in a practice called tumo.  They have competitions in the cold weather of the Himalayas to see who can dry a sheet on their backs that has been soaked in icy cold water.  By their will they are able to increase the effulgence of the infrared, the heat of the body, the phosphorescence.  That is what the rishis are doing, sitting in samadhi in the freezing cold, wearing hardly any clothes or no clothes.  This can be done simply by awakening this faculty.  

Another example is if we are in a state which we call righteous indignation, our temperature rises.  If we are very keen on truth and we're repeating the wazifa ya Huk, which means the truth, and we become like a dervish, then our temperature rises.  

The great art is to transform that infrared light into ultraviolet, and light at all levels of frequency, to become a source of light.  There is a practice that enables you to do it.  Imagine that your spinal cord is a chimney, and within it there's a flame.  If you look at a flame you can see a reddish color at the bottom of the flame and then you get into all the different colors of the spectrum.  You get orange, gold, green, blue, violet and ultimately ultraviolet.  As you inhale, imagine that flame and the different colors of that flame as you pass and review each one of your chakras.  Hold your breath, turn your eyeballs upwards, curl your tongue and press the bottom of your tongue against the roof of your mouth.  
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There are several stages now.  One is simply to concentrate on the light above your head, the crown chakra, which is colorless, and at the same time carries within it an infinite number of hues of colors, like a crown.  

It is only towards the end of the inhaling that we're aware of the light above our head, but when we hold our breath we make a real quantum leap.  We don't continue to identify with our aura; we identify with the light of intelligence.  As you breathe in, think that you are breathing in light through your eyes, which is actually so, because the light of the environment passes through the retina and is threaded in and through the optic nerves, and eventually enhances the light of the cells of the brain. We have this illusion we see objects, but what we see is the light that is refracted, radiated, or fluoresced  from these objects.  We don't see the objects, we see the light.  As we inhale then, we are absorbing the light those objects are reflecting or refracting or fluorescing into our being.  There is a tremendous accumulation of light.  The cells of the brain are functioning at high speed, processing all this light.  

Exhale now and think that the light in the brain is being threaded through the optic nerves, and reaching out into the environment through your retina and cornea.  If you just concentrate on the light you draw from the environment, then you don't give much chance to the light that would otherwise be cast forward through our glance. 
When I open my eyes to the outer world I feel myself as a drop in the sea; but when I close my eyes and look within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
As we inhale we are drawing in light, absorbing light from the eyes, and breathing through the eyes.  If we have our eyelids closed we are setting a barrier, obstructing the light that accrues from outside, and consequently we are creating conditions that are favorable to becoming aware of the light of our glance.  As you exhale concentrate on the light of your brain that is now threaded through your optic nerves and cast forward through your retina.  The eyelids are permeable to some extent and the ultraviolet light passes through them.  It even passes through the skull.  

Now if we were to open our eyes, the impact of the light from the environment would be so strong that we would be hard pressed to be able to cast any light forward through our glance.  However, we do have that ability.  We have the ability to somehow block the light that impinges upon our retina from outside, but we would have to do that practice every day, consistently for months and months. That is the reason why the rishis in the Himalayas and also the dervishes are able to look right into the sun with open eyes at dawn and for hours sometimes after dawn, because somehow the light of their glance is stronger than the light of the environment.  
Page 7
We protect our glance by our eyelids.  What you could do is just open your eyelids for a split second at the beginning of the exhale and observe the overwhelming impact of the light of the environment upon your attention.  This is where this attitude of vairagya, which means detachment and indifference, will shield you.  The yogis do it to consider that physical matter is an illusion.  It's not a philosophical statement, it's purely pragmatic.  Thinking it is illusion gives you some way of discounting it.  I find it's better to think one is caught in a perspective.  The impact of the environment is so strong that it catches your attention and forces it into a perspective.  One has the ability to free oneself from that perspective.  For instance, you know that people under the effect of drugs are caught in a perspective.  The effect of the chemical can be so strong that they cannot shift their perspective.  

As we meditate, we are able to use our incentive, our will, to free ourselves from a perspective, to offset our consciousness into a transfigured world.  The Sufi way is to think that what we call physical light is just the way light appears to us.  It doesn't mean it's light, it's just the way it appears.  When we think that way, it helps us to overcome the impact of the way that light forces the focus of our glance into a perspective. 
Page 8


The Passion for Light

Light meditations are the most inspiring of all practices, and the motivation behind them is a real passion for light.  It's in the realm of emotion.  One could say there is such a thing as luminous thoughts and luminous emotions, so what we are doing by way of practices must be considered as just a trigger to spark an attunement of one's consciousness.  Light could be considered as the ladder that hoists the soul towards its highest ideal.    
Every atom, every being, every star, every galaxy is preparing itself for the state of awakening. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Awakening is like the breakthrough of the clarity of light.  Light is not as physical; it signifies the emergence of clarity out of ignorance or ambiguity.

Let's begin with the practice of shaghal.  We're targeting three chakras: the bottom of the spine, the solar plexus, which is the counterpart of the heart -  they're both part of the same chakra, and then the top of the head. 

As you hold your breath, try to experience the flame we mentioned earlier.  As you know, the body is in a state of combustion that's regulated at a consistent temperature.  That means the cells of our body emit infrared light.  That light can be transmuted to light in the middle range and also to ultraviolet light.  Hold your breath and concentrate on this flame in that chimney; focus it in the solar plexus.  Think of the different colors that appear in the flame.

For this practice I suggest inhaling through both nostrils.  As you take away your fingers, visualize your body as incandescent.  When we do this we find ourselves in a transfigured setting of consciousness.  That's the reality behind what appears at the surface.  The fabric of our body is now our subtle body, not our physical body, although it's within our physical body.  It's even the template of the physical body, but it is like gossamer.  In a sense it is translucid and at the same time incandescent.  It's like looking at a burning candle.  We see the mesh deep down in the candle and  we see the light coming through the wax of the candle.  The light is diaphanous instead of radiant. 
There are those who are like a lighted candle: they can light other candles, but the other candles must be of wax; if they are of steel, they cannot be lighted.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Page 9
Time seems to slow down.  We are in a state of quiet ambiance.  We have distanced ourselves from the rat race so we are generating our own light.  We are transmuting matter into light, although light is considered matter. It's a very advanced state of matter where there are particles but no mass.  Now if we transit from one chakra to the next, we discover the spectrum is in our own aura and like the rainbow, except it's reversed.  The red is at the bottom and the ultraviolet is at the top until we get to that diamond-like colorless light at the top of the head, which is a scintillation of all  different hues that seem to merge in the crown chakra.  It has a sparkling effect there, whereas lower down the light is diaphanous.  Turn your eyeballs upwards and press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. 

It is helpful to imagine a landscape together with discovering new vistas regarding oneself.  Of course you can be creative and inventive, but I would suggest either a sunset or sunrise where the sky is a very brilliant red shifting into rose and eventually orange.  We are choosing landscapes that match our own particular way of envisioning ourselves.  We are in the landscape or skyscape and we reflect it and it reflects us.  This will bring us into a state which is likened to the state of reverie.  Our consciousness is offset from the day-to-day focus of consciousness. 
When love's fire produces its flame, it illuminates like a torch the devotee's path in life, and all darkness vanishes.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We not only concentrate on the flame, but the whole area around it, the effulgence of the body of light which is the aura.  It's like sitting in a room meditating and we feel as though we are illuminating the room, just like a firefly.  The consequence is that if we can keep our concentration in everyday life, then we are aware of bringing light whereever we go.  That concentration will enhance that particular radiance of our aura because that light is diaphanous and at the top of the head it is sparkling. 

Continue to breathe in through both nostrils and exhale through both nostrils.  Be aware of converging the peripheral light into the center of the channel so it burns as a flame.  
The light illuminates the path of those who are distant from it; those who are near are dazzled by it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Another aspect is that when we're inhaling we are like a diode. The current is allowed to pass one way but not the other way.  In the old days of wood fires in open fireplaces, one used to place newspaper around the top of the opening to make the opening smaller.  The flame would burn much more violently.  So you have a sense of protecting that flame by the same kind of thing we've come across all the time, placing a barrier in the way of our senses of perception.  That's what we do in shaghal.  Then as we exhale, we remove that newspaper, that barrier, so we can radiate.  When we inhale, we think of converging peripheral energy into the center and when we exhale the energy moves from the center to the periphery.
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Do you understand why we normally breathe in through the right nostril?  Perhaps you know the law of Gauss. If our right hand is a dynamo and it's turning counter-clockwise towards our fingertips, we'll be generating a current in our thumb.  It is the electrical relationship between a magnetic field and the current.  We're enhancing the energy that is rising in the center of the spine.  Then we reverse as we exhale.  Imagine that your hands are reversed and once more the energy is flowing towards your fingers, but this time the current ascends.  You could do it either way.  You could do it breathing in through the right nostril.  Now see the effect if you breathe in through both nostrils. 

The next step is to concentrate on the solar plexus as we inhale.  While you hold your breath concentrate on the new dispensation of energy that emerges, as in a white hole.  As you exhale, radiate energy from your heart center.  Breath in and out through both nostrils.  As we exhale, the light is radiant and seems to move out in concentric circles.  It's a much more overt kind of light than the diaphanous light we experienced in the first step. 
Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine Light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now this time simply inhale through the right nostril and place your fingertips on your eyelids.  As you inhale, you are aware of the light that is emerging in your eyes even though you are cutting out most of the frequencies of light.  The ultraviolet light can pass through your finger.  Your fingers act as a kind of filter.  Focus on drinking light through your eyes.  As you hold your breath concentrate on the pituitary gland.  Now you could continue to concentrate on the pituitary as you exhale, or exhale and imagine you're casting light through your glance.  Then in a more advanced stage, you could concentrate on the pineal gland and cast the light forward through your third eye.

There are some practices we can do with our eyes without putting the index fingers on them.  Your eyelids are almost totally closed but not quite.  There's just a slit.  As you breathe in focus on drawing light in through your eyes, and threading up into your brain.  Now close your eyes and hold your breath.  As you exhale open your eyes just slightly so you are concentrating the beam of light of your glance much more than usual.  Of course, you see you have to reverse the function of your eyes so you don't see things as you normally would when you have them half open.  All you see is light.
Wherever I look, I see Thy beloved face, covered under many different veils. The magic power of my ever-seeking eyes lifted the veil from Thy glowing countenance, and Thy smile won my heart a thousand times over. The lustre of Thy piercing glance hath lighted my darkened soul, and lo! now I see the sunshine everywhere.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now what you could do is imagine you are looking into the sun.  Don't actually do that because unless you're very careful you can burn your retina in a few seconds.  You can also gaze into a candle but it has a hypnotic effect and you might get into an astral state.  Be careful about that.  You could just imagine a very beautiful dawn.  Imagine the light before the sunrise where there is a lot more ultraviolet in comparison to the middle range frequencies of light. 
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The skyscapes correspond to these two later practices.  The first practice was light emerging from a subliminal level and manifesting at the surface. Then we moved into the very early beginnings of the dawning of light.  This is the kind of thing we do in the Himalayas.  We get up very early and meditate before dawn and capture that very early light.  The Earth shields most of the light rays, but the ultraviolet rays are able to pass through the surface of the Earth, so we get a lot of ultraviolet light, drinking it in through the eyes. 


Seeing Without Eyes

The next practice is going to be shaghal again.  Breathe in through the left nostril, but this time you concentrate on the light that descends through the fontanel at the top of your skull and impinges upon the brain cells.  As you hold your breath you concentrate on the pituitary gland again.  Next, really concentrate on the pineal gland as you exhale.  That means you are beginning to develop the light that sees through light. When Pir-o-Murshid talks about seeing without eyes, he means seeing a light that passes through the light of the glance of eyes.  There is a word in the Psalms of David.  I believe it says, "In thy light shall we see light."  It's not the light of our glance; that was the first step.  It is not the light of the galaxies; it is actually cosmic rays.  Instead of imagining you are converging the light of the stars as we did at the beginning, imagine it's cosmic rays that hit your head vertically and have tremendous impact on the cells of the brain.  Consequently the light that passes through our eyes, which is already the light which is inside the brain, is enhanced by that further dispensation of light that descends upon us.  A number of contemplatives described it as being struck by lightning. 

Once I tested a Pakistani man who claimed he could see without eyes.  He was very angry that I would question it.  I said, "Well, prove it."  It was at a party at the Pakistan Embassy.  We blindfolded him and opened a book and he read that book.  He was seeing without eyes, so it's not just poetry.  Of course that's a whole technique.  It is making astral projection.  The astral body can see without the body, but I'm not teaching that.  The technique I'm talking about does give you that kind of insight because the sharpness of your glance affects your thinking and your consciousness together with that very penetrating light.  It's a lot of ultraviolet and therefore it's passing through the surface of things.  There is that insight beyond your understanding.  That is the act of intelligence rather than consciousness.
Since my soul has caught Thy light, my glance has become a comet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Page 12
Continue the practice by turning your eyeballs upwards as you inhale.  This time you just inhale through both nostrils with your eyelids nearly closed, but not totally closed.  The slit is up because now your eyeballs are turned upwards slightly.  Rather than imagining the sun, you can imagine the cosmic rays hurtling through space.  Now hold your breath and close your eyes.  Concentrate on the link between the pituitary and the pineal gland, and on the effect of the pituitary on the pineal.  As you exhale, you definitely radiate light from the pineal gland through your forehead.  That ultraviolet light passes through the skull.  Open your eyes again, but just slightly.  Envision the ultraviolet light of the third eye passing through the beams of light of your glance, the two headlamps that are represented by the glance of your two eyes.  That is a light within a light.

There is another breakthrough practice.  It's a practice given by Buddha or that Buddha did himself.  I don't know whether he did the first stage.  You take a piece of cardboard, shape it like a disk, and paint it red.  I can't imagine Buddha doing that.  Now you look at that cardboard disk, then close your eyes and you see a green reflex.  You don't have to cut out a cardboard disk.  You can imagine a red disk and close your eyes and have the green reflex.  Now here is the important next step.  You imagine the disk as you exhale and the reflex as you inhale.  Jump from the reflex to the next reflex.  If you imagine a green disk, then of course you're not doing it.  You have to keep thinking that green is simply the reflex of the red, then jump from there to the next step which is orange, and so on.  You move from one reflex to another.  Each of these reflexivities acts like a key that unlocks the door of a further sphere of light.

You develop sensitivity to different spheres of light.  Instead of just thinking at the Malakut level, the celestial level, there are several heavens within it. Hildegard von Bingen referred to this when she said, "I found myself in a world of light, absolutely dazzled.  My whole body flooded with the light of that world.  Then that world of light seemed to turn into a gate and open up into a further sphere of light even more dazzling and overwhelming.  Eventually that world of light opened up into a still further world of light."

We're at the last stage.  Now instead of imagining a disk, we simply imagine colorless light, and then the reflex of the colorless light which is not what we understand by a reflex, but indeed there are levels of light.  As we do this we're gradually moving away from our commonplace conception of what we understand by light and closer and closer to what the Sufis call the light of intelligence. 
Intelligence is the light of life, the life of life, and the essence of the whole Being.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The key to illumination is that sudden outburst of the clarity of intelligence that sparks our whole aura into a tremendous outburst of effulgence.  That is what is meant in the Qur'an by a light upon a light.  You can imagine it's like a penny dropped.  All of a sudden, "Aha, I see it!"  Suddenly your aura lights up. Perhaps it would be a misnomer to say this is the key to illumination, but it is a pointer to illumination because our body participates in our realization.


Page 8
Skyscapes of the Soul

We're trying to introduce a dimension other than the worldly dimension into our perception of the universe and ourselves; that other kingdom of which Christ speaks, which is not 'up there.'  We have to discover the sacred in our environment and in ourselves.  We can do that by meditating on light.  Our path is a path of light, and when children are baptized in the Universal Worship, they are baptized in light.  

Can you imagine how the universe would look in outer space if our consciousness was able to expand and embrace the whole cosmos?  It would be the most incredible world of light.  If we were to envision ourselves as being made out of the fabric of this universe of light, we would discover another dimension of ourselves than the one we identify in our commonplace self-image.

One way of expanding our consciousness is to imagine the starry sky and clusters of galaxies, and realize the very fabric of our body is the fabric of those galaxies.  The fabric of our body originated in the Big Bang as a pure outbreak of radiant light and this light crystallized itself into matter.  You can imagine light that has gelled into a crystal, but our bodies are much more elaborate than crystals.  They are liquid crystals, transformed by light.  From the moment we do that, we reach out in our thoughts into the vastness of space, and realize we are part of this starry universe.  We can't be separated from it. 
The soul is light, the mind is light, and the body is light - light of different grades; and it is this relation which connects man with the planets and stars.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The powers of imagination in us are an extension of what the Sufis call the Divine imagination, which is the trigger behind all creativity.  We have the ability to extend our representation of the universe far beyond the constraint of the personal vantage point.  As we imagine the vastness we realize we are not just expanding our consciousness; we are altering our sense of identity by gleaning awareness of its vastness.  Let your imagination have a free hand in representing to yourself the most incredible skyscapes of light, colors, and sparklings; the explosions of light, effulgence, glory, fiery light, clashes of waves of lights sparkling into the effulgence of a rainbow.  

Just let your imagination endow you with the thrill of the ecstasy of light because that is the ultimate victory over our personal pain.  From our vantage point there are beings we think we have lost.  They have become beings of light, exalting in the spheres of light according to their degree of realization.  Even though we feel hampered, defiled and pummeled by the challenge of the social and physical environment, we remain unscathed in our being of light.  That's where our real being is, so this vision of the cosmos of light is going to help us to discover our real being and lift us above the limitations and tribulations of existential conditions on the planet.  
Page 14
Imagine you're a being of light hurtling into this ocean of light that is the cosmos.  You are discovering yourself as a being of light in this world of light and exalting in the ecstasy of light.  When you find you are free, you can fly wherever your heart takes you.  It is your ecstasy that constitutes your wings taking you aloft.  It is your attunement, your nostalgia for the sublime that determines the landscapes and skyscapes of light you discover.  They are really mirroring yourself, or you're mirroring them so you discover yourself in them.  Pir-o-Murshid says, "In the day condition, the world is outside you.  In the dream, the world is inside you."  In meditation, there is no more outside or inside.  

Don't be afraid that you're hallucinating into personal imaginings.  Your imagination is an expression of the creative imagination of the whole universe funneled down through the personal bias in a constrained fashion.  Trust your imagination when it is enlisted by your passion for the sublime, because it is through that ecstasy that the universe organizes itself as you.  It's almost as though you create the universe of light as you discover it, or you discover it as you create it.  It's beyond the commonplace experience that is demeaning to the spiritual status of our being. 
In the heart of man the whole universe is reflected; and as the whole universe is reflected in it, man may be called the heart of the universe.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
You may discover in the very configurations of this ocean of light the way your attunements and realizations match the forms of the universe.  They might actually fashion the forms or fashion themselves into forms in the world of light.  For example, you'll notice the difference between the sparklings where a cluster of light fragments itself into sparks.  That will corroborate with your sense of your individuality as unique.  Then you find the serenity of a peaceful sunset, for example, where all that variety of multiple expressions of reality seems to merge into oneness in the peace of the unification.  You might even find a battle happening there; volcanic eruptions and fire gushing forth from the conflicts of opposing forces.  You'll see yourself engaged in this battle if willfully you are a knight of light; otherwise you are a victim of violence.   

Now you realize this universe of light reflects the very drama of your own life and the struggle within your own being.  To what extent do we dedicate ourselves to those values we hold?  We do it to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice our lives.  I think of the Russian firemen and atomic engineers who flew over the tremendous outburst at Chrenobyl, knowing it was at the cost of their lives.  You'll recognize yourself in that battle, in the outburst of forces as illustrated in the volcanic eruptions and the consequent earthquakes that shatter our dependence upon earthly conditions. 

Next you'll find relatively obedient light beings as well as rebellious light beings.  You'll find photons that are in some way allowing themselves to be ordered by the static architectrony of the cosmos, or the architectrony that becomes sclerosed to repetitive conditioning.  Then you have the rebellious light beings like the comets that will not accept the constraint because they are endowed with greater energy.  
Page 15
You'll see them hurtling through space unpredictably.  It will make your heart beat faster when you see your need for freedom illustrated in this being of light, as opposed to towing the line and letting yourself grind in the samsaric wheel.  There is that repetitiveness of the vicious circle in which we allow ourselves to be inveigled in our lives unless we are moved by the power of the flame of our nostalgia for what Pir-o-Murshid calls the unattainable.  
No tie can bind you if your heart is free.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As you can imagine, these beings of light don't require the dimension of a comet.  There are such things as free electrons, for example, that escape from the samsaric wheel of their atom and start hurtling through space at the risk of colliding and losing themselves as an electron and becoming a photon.  That's resurrection.  It could almost forestall your body being transfigured into light instead of making a difference between matter and light, the fabric of your body and the light of your aura, because there is a continual conversion from the state of solid matter to the state of light.

See those dimensions of your being.  Depending upon the attunement of your consciousness, you can shift it one way or the other and discover an infinite number of facets, perspectives upon your being.  That is your freedom to be able to shift your perspective instead of allowing your perspective to be forced into focus by the conditioning of your upbringing, your culture, your education; the whole system we are involved in conditions our existence.  

Light liberates us from the emotional gravitational pull of the self-image.  We make our self-image based on the concept we have of our bodies as sclerosed matter, which they are not.  Remember, light is traveling through space at a speed of 186,000  miles a second.  The thought of being a being of light will liberate you from the constraint of being located in a point in space and subjected to gravitational pull, and all those concepts we make of ourselves in our very limited self-image. 


Luciferian Light 

Then there is a battle between the powers of light in the universe, between the pure light of selflessness and dedication to the highest ideal, and Luciferian light.  You can imagine what a tremendous confrontation that is.  The degree to which one can radiate pure light is a function of one's selflessness.  Light becomes Luciferian when one extracts it from its source.  For example, a battery is a power that has been disconnected from the source of the power, so it's limited.  The same is true with Luciferian light.  If we lose our sense of our pertinence to the totality, our concept of our own light is then Luciferian.  Even our representation of light can be misleading, deceptive, and ultimately counterproductive, as in the case of Lucifer.  This acts as a warning to those who want to work with the aura in order to become more radiant, but they think of that radiance as an effulgence of their own person.  That would be Luciferian instead of seeing the self in the context of the light of the whole universe, which the Sufis call Divine light.
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There are moral issues behind the meditations in light.  We need to entertain luminous thoughts and luminous emotions.  That means we do not allow our emotions to be tainted in the least by resentment, for example, which is a personal reaction and holds us within our separateness from the totality.  That's Luciferian.  It also means being so very up front that there is no shadow lurking in the dark in our being.  That does mean we are defenseless and as a child.  To discover our celestial counterpart we need to discover the child within that is still present within its defilement in our psyche.  That's innocence.  That means the inability to manipulate or plot or engage in any kind of intrigue, have any kind of agenda.  In the eyes of the world, it's at the cost of being naive - actually genuine rather than  naive - but defenseless.  We cannot count upon extraneous defense; our only defense is the light of the universe coming through our being. 
The souls of all are from one and the same source, but a soul which is unveiled shines out. Love and light come continually from such souls. We need no proof of it, for it is living; all else is dead in comparison. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We started with the representation of light that is based upon our experience of physical light.  Now we're talking about a level of light that cannot be limited by matter.  There is something in our being quite irrespective of the body that is of the same nature, or resembles what we understand as physical light, and which can be blighted by shadow, just like physical light.  Ultimately it will always prevail.  Even when there are clouds in the sky, the sun is still there.  Just from the point of view of the planet, the light has been veiled. 
The soul covers its own truth with a thousand veils from its own eyes. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
If we want to fulfill that deep nostalgia for light, we need to see what it is in our selves that veils the light of the universe, which is the light of our being.  That's the shadow that Jung was talking about.  It's the disregard for the spiritual status of other beings, the manipulation of beings, the undermining of beings for power, possession.  The light of our being is still there, but it is veiled under a bushel unless we are able to meticulously work with each of those elements that are beclouding the light.  It just depends on how important it is to us. 
There is light within every soul; it only needs the clouds that overshadow it to be broken, for it to beam forth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We find something really paradoxical when we look into the world of light, because when we look at it we are casting a glance upon it.  We not only perceive it, we discover the likeness between our own glance projected on the world of light and the world of light.  It's the way they match.  The witness in us is not different from the object we experience, it's counterpoint when we realize it's all one.  We mirror each other and see the similarity, and eventually discover our oneness.   
Page 17
Think of your glance like headlamps of a car instead of thinking of your eyes as organs of perception.  The glance is conditioned by the whole programming of the existential condition so that the retina generally acts as the receptor, a transducer of the light of the environment impinging upon the cells of the brain.  We can't see the stars when the sun is in the sky, for example.  The impact of the light on the retina impinging from outside is so great that, in comparison with the light the eyes radiate, it's the light of the brain that is cast forward through the optical nerves.  

You can downplay that receptive activity of your glance by your way of thinking.  There are several ways of doing it.  One is the Hindu way, which is to question the realness of the existential world.  

Another way is to shift our glance.  We have the ability to toggle between the all-encompassing setting of consciousness and a personal one.  For example, if we read pages of a book, our eyesight is highly focused through the consciousness.  Then if we look at a panorama, our eyesight is all-encompassing, and we can toggle between the two.  If we're looking at a hologram in which there might be two superimposed pictures, we can toggle our glance from one picture to the other.  

Although our glance is generally conditioned by the impact of the impression of the environment, we still do have the capacity to shift the focus of our glance.  Imagine that the physical world as we experience it is just a cross-section of a multidimensional universe.  If we think that way, we don't say the world is an illusion.  We say it's just the way things look at that cross-section.  We suspect that behind that limited perspective there are other perspectives and there is a whole world of light transpiring through that which appears.  

We can downplay the subjection to the impact of the impression of the environment.  When we do that, the light of our brain, threaded down through the optic nerves as our glance, is able to prevail over the light drawn in through the environment.  We become like a torch light casting our light on all things.  

Now at this level of the psyche we are able to cast the light of intelligence of the universe upon our problems, instead of judging things the way they appear from our personal assessment.  We see our problems in the cosmic context instead of under the personal bias.  Then we realize what we thought was our problem is simply our participation in the drama of the universe.  That is a way of liberating ourselves from constraint of our commonplace assessment of situations and the self-image that we carry in our psyche throughout our life.  We want to be able to make sense of our life in the context of the whole humanity, instead of being caught in a personal trip.  We want to reach beyond the narrow self-image which not only distorts our understanding of our life, but also affects our self-esteem.  Self-esteem is so important in order to find fulfillment in life.  That's where the light of intelligence makes all the difference in our realization of the meaningfulness of our lives and the relevance of ourselves in the universe.                 
The soul comes to a stage of realization where the whole of life becomes to him one sublime vision of the immanence of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Page 18
We can see a different perspective from the passive attitude of being receptive to the light of the physical world.  Remember that as long as we can see the sun, we can't see the stars.  I'm talking about the power of the light of our real being.  By being aware of our real being as a being of light, it gives such power to our glance that it overcomes, even repels, the photons that are trying to impinge upon our retina by their power.    

Pir-o-Murshid parallels our own light with the light of the sun.  He says that the sun, which means any star of course, is really the convergence of the light of the universe as in a vortex.  It is radiated from that point which becomes a source of light.  

We have the ability to converge the light of the universe and radiate it at the physical level.  We become that point which becomes a source of light.
What were the great personalities whose light has shown upon millions of people? Examples. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 


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The Experience Of Light

Close your eyes and imagine that you are looking into the starry sky.  You're amazed that your glance is able to reach such distances that could never be reached in a space craft.  Your glance is able to encompass a wide space that extends far beyond anything you could ever imagine.  The stars are really vortices in which the light of the light of the cosmos is converged.  Most of those stars you're looking at have ceased to exist many light years ago, so you're looking in the past.  The past is present in you, because the light of those stars is now; some of the sparks and photons of that light are now impinging upon your retina.  The thought of the miracle of life is really mind-blowing.  

Visualize that your body is made, not just out of the fabric of the planet, but the fabric of the stars.  It has taken all these billions of light years for the universe to elaborate you and me.  That whole past is present in us, which means we are beings of light even in our body-ness.  That light has crystallized itself into what we think is matter.  

Imagine that your body is like a biological crystal.  It has the extraordinary faculty of absorbing light from the environment, and being transformed by it.  Just imagine your body as a living crystal which is vibrating, transforming, and transmuting continually.  See how it reaches an excited state by absorbing light.  Enjoy the discovery of light.  

Enjoy first of all, the encounter with light.  Imagine you are looking into a bright light, and you are flooded with that light.  Instead of trying to shield your eyes, enjoy being blinded by that light.  You experience the ecstasy of communion with light.  That very encounter with light reveals the light that is not just absorbed by the crystal, but is present in, and radiated from the crystal.  You are revealing your light to yourself.  Since you are a crystal, then indeed not only do you enjoy the ecstasy of being able to draw in more and more light, but as you hold your breath, the cells of your body vibrate and divide much more intensely than ever before.  They begin to sparkle in communication with each other in the language of light, transmitting messages to each other, and exult in the ecstasy of light.  We are able to actually heal our body with light by the impact of the power of our representation of light upon the cells of our body.  We generate light energy by the power of our thought.
Even the branches swing in ecstasy when they receive Thy message.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now experience your whole aura.  We think of the aura as external to our skin, but it is also very deeply interspersed within the cells of our body, even within the nuclei of the atoms.  We are participating in our body-ness in the miracle of light.  Being aware of mind over body has an immediate effect upon our body functions, our body-ness.  
Page 20
Identify with your whole aura, inside and outside your skin.  It has a configuration, not a shape with a profile, but it espouses the contours of the body.  Imagine the face of your aura, it's the most expressive part of your body.  Sense the way the countenance of your face is transfigured by the encounter with light.  For example, just imagine you're looking into a very bright light, and somehow that light triggers off memories of having been a being of pure light prior to your incarnation into your body.  It's a sense of deja vu.  This world of light is there in our memory but we forgot it because we got exiled in the world of the shadows, as the Sufis call it.  Somehow, deep in our memory we have the recollection of moving about in the world of light, and being just light, before that light condensed as a physical body.  
Our spirit is the real part of us, the body but its garment. A man would not find peace at the tailor's because his coat comes from there; neither can the spirit obtain true happiness from the earth just because his body belongs to earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
If we just have this 'vision of the heavens,' we can deliver ourselves entirely into this world of light.  It's not far away somewhere and we're here, we can move right into it.  Discover your real being.  It is the very feeling of the ecstasy of light that hoists us from one perspective into another, because it's really like a hologram.  We experience ourself as a physical body in one perspective, like in a hologram, then we can shift our perspective.  It's not that we are hoisting ourselves out of our body as in astral travel, it's just a different perspective.  It's the pure delight of light that will lift us.  

The prospect of that delight impending in your soul will help you shift your perspective.  We can't shift by our will; it is emotion that will do it for us.  It can only happen if light is so important that it surpasses anything else.  The reminiscence of the heavenly state is so powerful it will transfigure our aura.  We'll find that, indeed, the countenance of the face of our aura seems to flower into great beauty.  
It is the exaltation of the spirit which is productive of all beauty.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Our aura is extremely sensitive to our attunement, our thoughts.  The only way to do this is to purge our thoughts from any ugliness whatsoever.  We've got to correspond to a very real state of our psyche that has been purified from all those things we don't like anyway.  For example, the slightest thought of intolerance about somebody who offended us would immediately blemish the face of our aura, giving it some kind of distortion.  The key is in letting our consciousness be raised by our nostalgia for light.  At the same time, there's the work that needs to be done to clear anything in our thoughts and in our emotions that might stand in the way.  

Our aura is a customized expression of the light of the cosmos.  Now imagine that ocean of light, which becomes known to you through the light of the stars, has fashioned itself into the human shape of the countenance of your aura.  Teilhard de Chardin calls it humanized.  Instead of just identifying with your aura and trying to espy the features of the countenance of your aura, I beckon upon you to think of it as an expression of the light of the whole cosmos. 
Page 21
Think of yourself as a condition of God, just like a wave is a condition of the sea.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Don't disconnect your aura from its foundation.  Think of your aura as a condition of the light of the universe that is continually changing, recurrently reshaping, and which is very sensitive not only to your thoughts and emotions, but also to the setting of your consciousness.  Even though your aura does not have a profile, it is still a zone of light which peters out at the jagged ends, but can increase in its extension.  Your aura can become enormous. 

Now turn within, and see that your aura is not just the light of the stars that has been converged, there's an all-pervading light that emerges from within and fans out into your aura.  We can't perceive the nature of this emerging light with our senses; we have to really experience it.  This is also true with other levels of light, which would give us some clue as to what we mean by our celestial counterpart.

 The Transcendental Dimension 

There are a few skills that will enable us to get some sense of what we mean by these more excellent levels of light, as compared to the all-pervading light.  The all-pervading light is the implicate state of light, the light field.  Now we're talking about other levels of light, the transcendental dimension.  We've already covered the practice given in Buddhism where you look at a color, such as red, then close your eyes and see the reflex, such as green.  This is called kasina.  You shift the setting of your consciousness with your eyes closed, as though you were withdrawing a little further back, then shift the setting of your consciousness up.  Think of your consciousness as a spotlight; you can shift it by changing the setting of the lens.  

As you exhale, represent to yourself the red disk.  Withdraw somehow so that you are able to perceive the reflex, which is green.  It's no use imagining a green disk; it's got to be a reflex.  You can toggle between the imaginary disk and the reflex, but the reflex has got to be of a different nature than the disk.  

The next step is more difficult, and that is trying to shift your glance or your consciousness so that you're able to grasp the reflex of the reflex.  You're going to have to keep that sense of the green disk as a reflex, then somehow shift into a more subtle level of reality.  You should find out yourself, but to me it appears to be orange.  Now don't just imagine an orange disk; it must be something that suddenly flashes into your consciousness.  Imagine the red disk to be out of reach.  The secret is finding the setting of your consciousness in which the scene of the physical world seems to be out of the focus of your consciousness.  It's there, but it's remote and not easy to get in touch with it.  You remember it, but it appears as a dream. 
Every experience on the physical, astral, or mental plane is just a dream before the soul.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Page 22
We are literally hoisting ourselves into the spheres.  The pitfall is our prefiguration of it.  Our theories and representation might stand in the way of the actual experience, because it's nothing like what we could ever imagine in our mind, unless we have actually experienced it.  Of course it is helpful at an early stage to imagine perfunctorily that we exist on several planes.  We might imagine one is higher than the other, but that is a rather simplistic way of looking at things.  People are so used to thinking in terms of up and down, because that is the way space appears to us, especially the gravitational pull of the Earth.  Here we're talking about levels of reality where space has no meaning.  For example, we're meditating and imagining a form, such as the countenance of our aura.  It doesn't have a profile, but it still has some kind of configuration, so space does have some meaningfulness.  
Time and space are but the length and breadth of the infinite.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
As we reach beyond, we're entertaining thoughts that do not relate in any way to space.  It would be misleading to think we are lifting our consciousness.  The word 'lifting' has some kind of connotation when we think of space.  No, it's something else.  Think that it's a hologram in which we can just shift our perspective.  We see one picture in the hologram, and then shift our perspective and see another one.  That's what we were doing, we're shifting our perspective.  

Somewhere we have to overcome the limitation of our commonplace minds.  We think of light as a physical phenomenon.  David Bohm said,  "It is just a ripple in the ocean of reality."  We have to eschew this rather simplistic representation of light if we are to have any sense of what is meant by celestial light, the light of the spheres and the light of intelligence.  It is a far cry from what we understand by the physical nature of light.  

Try to get some sense of the different colors of your aura.  There's really no such thing as color; there's only frequencies of light that we interpret as colors.  Let's say that your aura, even though it has a human configuration, does have some resemblance with a spectrum of light.  In the lower layers of your aura the light is red, in the higher it appears as ultraviolet, and in between you have all colors of the spectrum.  Generally the frequencies of light in the aura keep on shifting depending upon our attunement, emotions, thoughts, and so on.  It's a mixture of colors that is rather chaotic most of the time.  When we are very concentrated and attune ourselves to a specific emotion, like peace for example, the colors get much more ordered.  By our will we can impose some kind of orderliness upon the frequencies so the aura gets in tune, just like tuning a harpsichord.  We can tune our aura too, so the sequence of colors corresponds with the spectrum.  

We have previously covered the principle of fluorescence, absorbing light from the environment and the starry sky.  The atoms of the cells of the body have the ability to absorb light, and consequently the electrons start jumping from one orbital to the next, so literally they can free themselves from the constraint of their original state.  That is the dance of the atoms that Jelaluddin Rumi refers to, and the dance of Shiva.  Some electrons free themselves from their orbitals altogether.  It's a cosmic vision that will help us to become aware of the extraordinary phenomenon of light taking place within our own bodies.  Then the atoms do not just reflect or refract the light, they emit light.  The cells have absorbed light, have been enriched by light, and radiate light. 
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When I am absorbed in Thy glorious vision, Beloved, even my tear-drops turn into stars.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 There's a different principle which is called phosphorescence, the ability of the body to burn itself to produce light.  That's an ability that has been lost by the human being, but it is there and can be awakened.  It is the ability to transmute infrared light into light in the physical range, or even ultraviolet light.  The secret of doing this is to pass and review each of your chakras and label each chakra with a certain color.  It's like the practice described in another chapter where you imagine a flame rising in a chimney.  The colors in a flame correspond with the sequence of colors in the spectrum.  

Imagine the bottom chakra, Muladhara, to be red.  Imagine the second chakra, Svadhishthana, to be a vermilion color, or an ocher color like the robes of the sanyasins in India.  Imagine the solar plexus, Manipura, as a beautiful orange, like you can see in the clouds sometimes at dawn or at sunset.  The heart chakra, Anahata chakra, is a beautiful gold like the sun.  The throat chakra is emerald green, and the eyes, sky blue.  The third eye is violet, or even ultraviolet.  The pituitary gland is the center of the whole, fanning out of colorless light, which is scintillating into various hues, and which is called the crown center, Sahasrara.  If you imagine those colors, they will have the effect of ordering the frequencies of light in your aura.  

 Jacob's Ladder of Light 

Now, instead of just thinking of each chakra separately, and the color as a band of striated color, think of a flame.  There's a gradual shift from one color to the other, although there are certain principles.  There are quantum leaps.  If you can do it, here again there's ecstasy.  We are doing some work with our creative imagination, which hopefully does have a real effect upon our aura - mind over body.  It is only effective if one enjoys the ecstasy of discovering the different colors of light, as for example, watching a rainbow.  It carries us beyond our earthly consciousness, and even our earthly identity.  There seems to be a sequence in even the psychological effect of these different colors.  We can look upon the frequencies of the different chakras as the Jacob's ladder of light, which helps hoist our consciousness beyond the earthly spheres.  Notice that your whole attunement is very different.  The earthly perspective falls out of focus as we move upwards.  There's a sense of being able to exist independently of the body, but it depends on what we mean by the body.  At a certain point the subtle body acts as a support system as our consciousness shifts into the transcendental dimension. 
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Explore this now.  It might be difficult to get right back down to the earthly sphere, but that's what we're doing; we're learning how to be able to shift consciousness at will, instead of being caught in a perspective.  We are free to shift our perspective, and it's very good that we are able to shift our perspective right down to the Earth plane, and then at command of our will to raise our consciousness above the Earth's sphere.  Do it several times, but be careful not to become other-worldly and disconnected with the Earth.  

Just imagine you are your body.  If you think you're your body, you are sitting and the world is outside you, and you think you're the subject experiencing the physical world.  That's what I call commonplace thinking.  Now start identifying with your etheric body and its light field, that very subtle magnetic field you can feel.  You don't feel it just around your head, shoulders, arms and chest, but also inside your body.  It's like the magnetic field of a magnet.  If you do that, you are not quite clear about being a subject experiencing an object, because this field intersperses with the fields of other beings.  You don't quite have a clearly defined sense of the subject and the object as two different realities.  There's a sense of the intermeshing of consciousness with the object.  In fact, David Bohm said that if we start looking deeply into matter, we'll find something which is of the nature of the mind.  It's not just an interconnection, but an intermeshing.  It's interspersed, interfused like radio waves.  We can't think the same way as when we thought we were a body.  We are connected with all beings, and they with us.  There's a kind of osmosis between other beings and ourselves, and ourselves with other beings.  
The soul of all is one soul, and the truth is one truth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we examine the nature of our thinking, we will find we do not think in terms of discreet entities with frontiers.  Our thoughts are not in categories of reason.  In terms of physics, we're not looking at matter as particle-like, but as wave-like.  Particles collide, and waves compose to form wave interference patterns.  It is a web of interconnections.  It is in this state that we can get into the consciousness of another person, because we're all connected in the depth.  It's like water lilies at the surface of the water are all connected in their roots.  That is a mode of thinking that is not logical, or at least does not fit into our solipsistic logic, and which we can only define as the reconciliation of the irreconcilables.  

Now, try to feel light.  I'm not saying to imagine light or that it has anything to do with our thoughts.  We can actually feel our aura of light.  It feels very different from the etheric body.  Identify with it, and consider your body as a formation within that template that is the etheric body, and the etheric body as a formation within that template which is the aura.  

The area of light closest to our body is more luminous.  The light gets scattered a little bit as it goes further and further away.  Our connection with other persons, for example, is much more closely woven than when we identified ourselves with our etheric body.  With the etheric body there is a spillover, whereas here there is a real, very deep, very fine woven intermeshing.  If we identify with our etheric body, we can find people in our psyche.  
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We begin to think like them or speak like them or they are really present in us.  It's not quite the same as when we identify with our aura.  Just try it out and see.  Photons do not have a mass whereas electrons do.  We don't feel the same type of interconnection with other beings as we do when we identify with our aura. 

The first thing, of course is to get a sense of the countenance of the face of our aura.  Now think of a person.  Instead of thinking of that person as a body located somewhere in space that you'd have to visit, or sensing the kind of power emanating from that person, imagine the countenance of the aura of that person. See that it is another yourself.  Each wave is like another aspect of the sea.  It's like a condition where there is some kind of affinity with your condition.  You know that person by resonance rather than by the I/it relationship. 

Remember that somehow the core of beings is immaculate, even though it is defiled. When we think of another person at the level of the aura, the distortion is more at the surface.  When we reach into the essence of that person, then it is pure, germane, authentic.  It is a way of getting to know people in the way that we could never know them by judging them in our minds.  We can even feel the struggle of the soul of people with the defilement of the world.  It's very painful for the soul to feel the distortion that effects it superficially, but still, it does effect it.  This is a strange thought, pain at the light level.  We can also sense the joy of people, not just their pain. 
As soon as a person begins to regard the pleasure and displeasure of God in the feelings of every person he meets, he can only be refined, whatever his position in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Walter Chappel was photographing flowers with ultraviolet light and you could see this translucent halo of light around the flowers.  He wondered if he could photograph them with the light of his aura.  He concentrated very intensely on ultraviolet light, on the violet color for example, and he took the photographs.  The flowers had an aura!  Then he noticed that when he was in a good condition, the aura was beautiful and harmonious, but when he was angry, the aura of the flowers began to have spikes.  The auras of the flowers were picking up his attunement.  The pictures were a feedback system that enabled him to sense something about himself, like a mirroring phenomenon.  That being so, as we lift ourselves to the level of light when we communicate with people, we can sense their auras that look very much like the photographs of Walter Chappel. 
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The Realm of Attunement

Our powers of imagination are a function of our attunement.  We're awakening from a perspective of light into a higher perspective of light, like in a hologram.  We awaken from a dream and our consciousness is raised beyond the limitation of the sphere of light in which our perspective was caught, into a still loftier level of consciousness.  Pir-o-Murshid says we are awake to the world that we are able to grasp, and asleep to those levels that we are not able to grasp.  Our perspective is the level at which we are conscious.  We are not conscious of the other levels unless we awaken from them.  For example, imagine that you're on the first floor and you're contemplating the ceiling.  You walk on that ceiling and then you're contemplating the ceiling of the next floor.  It's a very remote comparison, but it gives a sense of the ladder, hoisting ourselves from one rung of the ladder to the next by successive awakenings.  Each awakening corresponds with a different level of light. 

Experience yourself, as Hildegard de Bingen described, being absolutely flooded with light.  Imagine light on your chest, your shoulders, your face, just as though you're sitting in front of a very bright lamp.  She says this world of light begins to open as if it were a gate, into a still higher world of light that's even more brilliant.  This world of light opens to still a further world of light. 
Let my heart reflect Thy light, O Lord, as in a pool of water the sun is reflected.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Be aware of the light that is emitted through your eyes.  Imagine you are absorbing light through your eyes as you inhale and you are emitting light through your eyes as you exhale slowly.  Follow the light as it is threaded along the optic nerve into the brain cells.  Hold your breath, and just be aware of the light in the brain.  The ultraviolet light breaks through the skull and that is the crown of light.  Now, of course, the brain also absorbs ultraviolet light from the environment through the skull.  There is also light that descends through the fontanel into the brain, so it's not just ultraviolet light. 

Imagine you are looking into colorless light and you are being flooded by this light.  Turn your eyeballs upwards now and try to represent to yourself the reflex of that colorless light.  As you inhale, absorb light through your eyes.  Hold your breath and turn your eyeballs upwards.  You are now absorbing light from the celestial spheres instead of physical light.  Focus your glance inward and concentrate on the fontanel.  The light you absorb through the fontanel is of an even more excellent nature than the celestial light.  As you exhale you radiate that light as two beams of light cast forward through your eyes.  You represent this celestial light as being infiltrated in the beams, a light within a light.  Imagine a stream of higher frequency light within a denser stream of light.  If you are able to shoot an arrow of light through that stream of higher light, your glance has a penetrating effect.  It's not exactly like an x-ray, but it has a penetrating effect since it is grasping what transpires behind that which appears.  Now all the light you've been absorbing somehow gets directed into the glance. 
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You can develop the glance as you're walking in the physical environment.  The first step is to imagine seeing the things that delight you or scare you or the things you don't like.  The second step is to think to yourself, "my eyes are simply the eyes through which God sees.  God is discovering His/Her body, which is the physical world, through my eyes."  That represents a more advanced step from the usual one of thinking that we're the one who is perceiving, but it's still limited by thinking in terms of duality. 

The third step is to think, "My glance is the Divine glance that has been funneled down or focalized through a lens."  In other words, you are connecting yourself to the totality, of which you are a condition, like a wave is a condition of the sea.  Holistically every fragment carries within it the totality.  You have automatically raised yourself to a higher level than the commonplace one if you just simply think that way. 
Thy favorable glance causes the sun to rise in my heart, Beloved; and with the turning of Thy glance, the sun sets.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
There are ways of hoisting our consciousness.  The clue would be to disengage the center of the being from its secondary effects, like unclutching.  In Buddhist terms it is unclutching that which is an unbecoming from that which is of the samsaric nature of becoming. 

Suppose I say, "How do you feel?"  You might then say, "I feel cold," or "I feel hot," or "I feel sad," or "I have a toothache," or "I'm bored."  Whatever you say, it's obvious that you are identifying yourself with your self-image.  You're not identifying yourself with your real being.  In meditation we are trying to eschew that limitation, whereby we identify with our self-image, so we can discover our total being.  Now suppose as an alternative you were to say, "Yes, my personality is sad, but that is not really me."  If my body is in pain, I don't say I'm in pain.  I'm unclutching the deeper reality of my being from its secondary effects, which is the body or the personality. 

Most of the time we are identifying with dimensions of our selves that are secondary, and have accrued to us through the course of our descent through the spheres.  When I say descent, I just mean the way the setting of our consciousness has shifted.  We haven't descended geographically.  If you can see that, it is the clue to meditation. 

The criterion is the confusion in our minds between our self-image and the thought of, "Who I am, who we are."  Our self-image is not what we think we are, and when we are asked to say how we feel, we fall back in our self-image unless we are warned that it's not about that.  Since it is true that every fragment of the totality carries the totality, then the totality is potentially present in our being.  Remember that's in our being, not in our self-image.  Practicing this is a way of hoisting our consciousness into the transcendental dimension that we discussed earlier. 
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In the image of man, my beloved Lord, I see Thine own countenance.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Consider yourself as a pendulum.  At one end it is moving in time and space.  That's what one calls body-ness.  At the other end is the non-becoming, that aspect of our being that does not change.  All the transitional stages are in-between these two.  It just depends at which point of the pendulum we identify.  Normally one identifies with the bottom of the pendulum, that piece of lead that is swinging right and left.  We're trying to shift our identity up that pendulum.

We could think we are extracting or extricating our higher being from our lower being,  thinking, "My body is not me.  My body is just a garb that I donned by incarnating on the planet and one day it will dissolve."  That's the old-fashioned way of thinking.  Now we know the very cells of our body carry the impact of our awareness.  The protons and possibly photons live forever.  Extracting our higher self from our lower self as we hoist ourself upwards would result in a break at some point in our being, which is what happens in astral travel.  

Rather, the body is transmuted just like in alchemy.  The liquid is distilled into vapor, or in flowers one can extract the perfume.  Perfume represents a condition of the flower whereby it has transmuted itself from a perishable nature to an everlasting nature.  That means there is something everlasting even in our body-ness.  It's not extracted though.  The very cells of our body are processed through transformation by dint of realization. 


Psychology of Attachment

There is a psychological element here.  Our attachment to earthly conditions maintains us in our body consciousness.  It is our freedom from attachment and dependence upon earthly conditions that enable us to shift our consciousness into higher levels of awareness.  There is no use just imagining higher spheres.  We could induce ourselves into some kind of wishful thinking or hallucinations and delude ourselves.  It really has to do with how we consider our life and what we see as important.  For example, I've lived in caves in the Himalayas as a sanyasin.  At first I had this veneer of Western civilization.  I had a very efficient back pack with a tent, a cooker, a blow-up mattress, and of course food.  It was very heavy so I kept on dumping things along the way.  I thought maybe I really didn't need the cooker, I could just burn some wood.  Eventually I even left the sleeping bag.  It gets to the point where you harden your body to endure the cold, the heat and the thirst.  You find freedom from your support system.  Maybe that is something most people living in the West in modern civilizations don't know.  We don't know to what extent we have become surreptitiously dependent on our refrigerator, our cooker, even our car.  We have to know we can do without it.  We can have it as long as we can let it go. 
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It is easy to tie a knot of attachment, but it is difficult when you wish to unravel it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
That is vairagya. It starts with not doing things, like not smoking or taking drugs any more.  You discover your addictions and see them very clearly.  Of course there are withdrawal symptoms, but fundamentally your psyche is producing a strategy which gives you self-confidence when you're surrounded by those puffs of smoke.  That's what Pir-o-Murshid means when he says the secret of raising our consciousness is working through our ties with the world.  It's really going to the solitude of the soul.  We don't have to go in a cave in the Himalayas.  It's a matter of finding that deep authenticity in our being, in the silence of independence from any support system whatsoever.  For example, imagine a composer being able to compose without a piano.  Just imagine the notes!  It's freedom from the support system. 

What we're trying to do is very challenging; being in life while being clear with how we are endowed with the ability to involve ourselves and also the ability to find detachment at the same time.  Detachment is a defense against pain, so when I say downplay a perspective and highlight another, that's an effort of consciousness.  Now we're talking about an emotional attunement rather than shifting our consciousness with the will.  It is that inner detachment that will shift our consciousness.  We can't shift our consciousness by our will. 

Again, think of a person, but represent that person with their aura rather than thinking of their body, their mind or their personality.  Imagine the aura when you're meditating.  Now maybe it's the imagination, but we are gifted with a kind of intuition.  We have an inborn knowledge in us that can be awakened in the right situation.  For example, if you are thinking of that person and imagining their aura, you are awakening a knowledge of that person that is hidden in yourself and that is hidden in that person. 

As we mentioned earlier, it is your glance that is building the picture of that person.  Your glance is fashioning the fabric of light into the image of the aura of that person.  That image surfaces from the world of light.  I remember a word of Plotinus about a person who was carving wood.  He said, "The sculptor is releasing the form that is already there in the wood."  The aura of that person is there in the world of light and we are arousing it by our glance.  We are making that person present at the level of light.  This also applies to people who have died.  Some people think, "They're lost and I'll never see them again," or "Perhaps I will see them when I die."  You can see them now at the level of light; you don't have to wait until you die.  Light is a wave interference pattern.  Photons don't have mass so they are all interconnected.  That means that at the level of light, those people are in us and we are in them. 

The important thing is your glance.  Think of your glance as a paintbrush of an artist.  You have an invisible picture on a piece of paper and all you have to do is to put a liquid on or use a brush and somehow the picture emerges.  You can help a person arouse potentialities in their being by making them aware of their aura of light.  This awareness comes by visualizing the aura of light.  Pir-o-Murshid says the glance unlocks that which is potential.
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God is hidden in his creation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
You are subliminally arousing it, awakening it and making it actuated.   One can awaken the God within.  The sense of awakening something virtual leads much further than that because you could think of God as a virtuality that becomes a reality in you. 
In matter consciousness has slumbered for eons of time and is continually awakening in matter.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Consider that you're invited to be an initiate in a cosmic initiation, not necessarily in the institutionalization of spirituality.  You are invited to take the steps that lead towards awakening and illumination.  Those steps require you to look very clearly at your motivations in life, because being an initiate doesn't mean being a sanyasin.  It does mean being dedicated to a very high venture, therefore we need to make the steps at all levels of our being to be able to reach that objective.  That objective is like the horizon that recedes as we advance. 

Now we're going to do the opposite and see that light is already in the body.  Our aura is not other than our body.  We're trying to unclutch.  We can see the body's psychological needs, cultural needs, all kinds of needs.  We can also see there is pain and frustration when those needs are not fulfilled.  Those needs, legitimate or not, justified or not, rob us of our freedom.  Consequently they will act as a deterrent against the raising of our consciousness which we understand by awakening or illumination. 

We can never accurately say that we are awake or that we're illuminated, but there are outbreaks of awakening or illumination.  Both are very closely connected.  For example, think about something that you have become dependent on, and feel how that dependence is holding you back.  It has a gravitational effect on you being.  Somehow you realize this, and find some independence from your dependence.  You experience a freedom just on that particular subject.  

All of a sudden there is going to be an emotional outburst of ecstasy.  You say, "Ah yes, that's true.  I'm free."  That's an awakening.  It's as though you're awake from a way of thinking that had limited you in your realization.  You see something you hadn't seen before.  The way Pir-o-Murshid describes being awake is to imagine you are awake amongst people who are sleeping.  Things that seem real to people are unreal for you and things that are unreal for people seem real to you.  Things that are of great importance to people don't seem important to you, like when Buddha left his kingdom.  It wasn't important.  Everything seems to be quite the contrary of what one was convinced. 
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Imagine, for example that we feel quite sure we understand our problems, and all of a sudden we realize it wasn't so at all.  We might think, "Yes, I'm on a spiritual path, and I'm seeking illumination, but I could never attain illumination living the life I live."  We're convinced that our circumstances are a prison that prevents us from awakening.  All of a sudden we realize it's the other way around; it's just in these conditions that we can awaken.  That in itself is an awakening.
My emotion, where do you come from?-From the everflowing spring of your heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 There comes a time when we meet people and we're able to gauge the attunement of their emotion.  We also become very aware of our own attunement, and by being aware of it we feel a nostalgia for the sublime.  We attune our emotions very high, and we find that has a transforming effect upon our body and our personality.  

The prison is in our thinking, and deeper still it's in our emotions, not in the circumstances.  The Tibetans call illumination the light of bliss.  They're not just talking about light; they are talking about an emotional high.  It is that emotional high that is going to hoist us from our earthly perspective.  It's in the realm of attunement.  We can't reach awakening by thinking or realizing.  It has to be by ecstasy.
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The Light of Purity

We need to communicate together at a deeper level than just the mind level to trigger transformation in you and also in me.  I have to be able to get into your consciousness and you have to be able to get into mine.  We have to mirror each other.  Let's begin by you getting into my consciousness. 

I'm thinking of those nights when I was meditating through the night facing the Bodi tree where Buddha is supposed to have attained illumination.  Many monks are bowing on the ground and lifting themselves again and there are a lot of candles, and the whole atmosphere is magical.  I get into the consciousness of Buddha and imagine him sitting there.  He fasted for many, many days and his consciousness was reaching to the outskirts of the universe.  He saw himself as that totality instead of thinking of himself as reaching out of his personal self.  That makes the difference.  I remember the attunement and maybe I can communicate something of that attunement if you are able to extend out your consciousness and reach into mine.  Perhaps you feel something of that attunement of immensity.  It's not an effort of your will to try and control your thoughts, it's an overwhelming surge of realization prompted by an emotion of cosmic scale which transforms your being. 
Immensity of space, thou showest to me the majesty of His presence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There was a support system present; the whole historical past and an environment which was conducive to that attunement.  This system supported the ability to visualize a being who had attained illumination.  Thinking of this being has the effect of awakening in me what happened to him, and therefore, if you are communicating with me, it awakens in you.  It reveals to us what is already in us.  For example, if you hire an alpine guide in Chamonix, he tests you first.  If he thinks you can stand a further test, then you'll hang on a cliff with your right hand on a crag and your left hand on another, your feet still on other crags and then he says to you, "Let go of your left foot and swing it to that next crag over there." 

You would never do it yourself.  The guide is not telling you to do it, he is telling you that you can do it.  He is revealing your capacity.  We doubt our capacity because we identify ourselves with what we think we are.  Our doubts are in two areas: one is what we think about ourselves, and the much more subtle one is where the support system, the conditions which favor an attunement, are not an artifice. 

Suppose you go to church and you have all this beauty: the beautiful cathedral and the colored windows, the organ playing, the colors of the priests' robes, the incense, the intonation of the prayers, the moving ceremony; that's a real support system.  Under those conditions, it is easier to be in a high state because you are supported by the environment. 
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That means that one is dependent upon outer circumstances.  If we were sitting in an ice cream parlor, it would be very difficult to maintain that attunement.  We have become dependent upon the support system.  There comes a time when we begin to see the hoax of the support system, the hoax of all we believed in that was a support.  We see there was some make-believe in it, or wishful thinking.  That happens if one is extremely scrupulous about truthfulness. 


The Dark Night of the Soul 

Through the darkness of night my soul seeks for Thee.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

I'll tell you a story about the Mass of Bernstein.  People told me to never go there, it's just horrible.  Of course that is a reason to go there.  Here was this wonderful celebration, dancing, joy, the prayers, wonderful communication between the priest and people.  The priest would say, "Let us pray," and everybody would kneel down and pray, and there was this wonderful feeling.  Then there was a man who said, "Oh, this is ridiculous, you let yourselves be fooled by this priest."  He was really impolite.  Different priests came and people came again, but now there was this malaise.  This man could see there was a show here.  People enjoyed it, but it was a show.

For him it was a show, but maybe he should not have said it to the people because for them it was wonderful.  More and more priests started to disrobe themselves and a great priest came, but there was still a sense of malaise.  The great priest left and eventually returned disrobed.  He pushed the altar over, threw the candles on the floor and he and everybody collapsed.  I thought, "Good God, what a pity! It was so wonderful."  Then out of that darkness, the dark night of the soul, came a little boy, twelve years old, with the voice of an angel.  He carried a candle and was chanting.  The people began to stand up again, and made a procession behind the little boy. 
The illuminated soul finds its way through darkness both within and without.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There is great significance displayed in that Mass.  In our time, we are going through a transformation from that outer display towards the real thing within.  The dark night of understanding that St. John spoke about is our doubt.  That spark of light in the middle of the dark helps us undergo the transformation from being the priest of the past, to being the priest of the future, like the little boy.  The past is now coming through in the child who will become mature, and who announces the future.  We don't always recognize that child in ourselves.  Turning within is discovering the innocent core of our being from which we emerged, and there was some defilement in that unfurling of our being through the spillover of the environment.  We need to return to that pristine state like in the embryo and be born anew. 

I'm thinking about that moment again when I was sitting opposite the Bodi tree.  That past experience is in me, and consequently, in you.  I am communicating it to you.  The past is still living in the present, but it is transformed.  Now we get to a very important realization as to what happens when we turn within.  We are downplaying the memory of the actual experience of the environment. 
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As I have said before, the physical and social environment continues to live in our thoughts.  The memory of those impressions is still functioning in us and that is a mistake we make when we turn within; we find ourselves encapsulated in these random thoughts.  The totality of our being, the universe, is inside us.   In our usual experience we are the subject with the world outside.  Now as we turn within, we realize that what we thought was outside us is inside.  For example, we know there is an osmosis between people's psyches, and that we can find people inside ourselves.  We usually think they are out there because this corresponds with a certain perspective, but we can shift our perspective.  That experience of Buddha is in me and it is in you.  Think of the metaphor of Pir-o-Murshid, "When I am in my ordinary consciousness I think I am a bubble in the ocean, and when I turn within I realize that the ocean is present within the bubble."

Just consider a plant.  A plant is a seed, but really the plant is a program endowed with energy that is transforming the environment into a plant; the earth, the water, the air, the light; that's really what we are.  The environment gets condensed in that plant.  In the same way, we are like that plant and the whole bounty of the universe gets organized a different way in us from the way it gets organized in somebody else. We are customizing the creativity of the universe.  Those potentials that lie beyond our self-image are virtually present in our being, because our being is co-extensive with the universe.  There is a sense of the vastness of our being internally instead of externally. 

It is true that our sensitivity to all this bounty is so fragile, so dim in the case of most of us that our assumption of who we think we are, and the impressions of the outer world, are much stronger.  Consequently, as I mentioned before, the light of the sun is stronger than that of the stars. 
Life is a continual battle. Man's constant struggle with outer things gives a chance to the foes who exist in his own being.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We have set a barrier to stand in the way of our consciousness perceiving the outer world.  When consciousness is barred from its ability to perceive outside, it turns within.  The mode of experience as we turn within is totally different from what we  experience when we turn without.  We are the subject experiencing other than ourselves when we turn without.  Turning within leads us to discover the universe emerging as ourselves.  It is a resonance, attunement;  a revelation because it is not a knowledge that is acquired, but simply a knowledge of our real self that is revealed.   

Do the breathing practice shaghal, and instead of trying to visualize your real countenance, just imagine that it is revealed to you.  Instead of it just being one face, it is many faceted.  You have input into what aspect of your being is revealed to you.   Think of a scene where you are walking in the moonlight alongside a lake in the peace of the night.  Everything is still; there's no wind.  The light of the moon is  reflecting a diaphanous light on the very gentle ripples at the surface of the lake. 
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 There may be a little bit of mist, but you're just looking at the lake through a translucent veil.  The whole scene seems to be absolutely magical.  Now turn your attention towards yourself.  You find that your being matches the nature of the lake and of the whole scene. 

For example, instead of stomping around, you seem to be floating more than walking, and your body seems to be ethereal instead of solid with a definite profile.  You could even feel that you're really part of that whole scene.  An aspect of your being is now revealed to you, and you had some input in deciding you were going to visualize that landscape of the soul. 

Let's move to another scene.  You see someone coming out of a concentration camp and you are there.  That person is dazed, wounded in the body, in the mind, the heart and soul and can't believe that s/he is free.  How does your face look when you look at that person?  You have a very different expression than the one when you were walking along the lake in a peaceful state.  It is compassion, and that means you are suffering with that person in solidarity.  If you are able to suffer with that person, your consciousness is able to transpose itself into the consciousness of that person.  Your compassion is healing their wounds and giving them support.  That scenario is going to awaken a quality in you which is latent.  It took that situation to awaken the God within. 
The most beautiful form of the love of God is His compassion, his Divine forgiveness.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The potentialities of our being are continually being awakened by the situation.  We also have within our minds the capacity of representing a scene to ourselves that will awaken the corresponding qualities.

We are continually ingesting the environment, placing sentinels at the doors of perception that filter desirable impressions, but there's a second set.  We don't just filter them off, we transmute the impressions we cannot cope with.  The quintessence of that experience is enriching and assimilating deeper and deeper in our being.  As we turn within, our whole being keeps on being distilled, refined, and quintessenciated.

If we follow that inner process as far as we can go, we reach the immaculate core of our being.  That's the child in us.  This is very different from thinking of the universe as potentially present in us.  It's like the embryo; everything is potentially there but needs to be unfurled.  The beauty of it is that it is pure.  It has not been defiled, which will help us in our struggle with our self-esteem.  We realize that whatever we've done, or whatever has been the spillover of the impressions of the environment, the core of our being is like a mirror that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it.  We have to reverse the maturing process in our personality to undergo the process of rebirthing and return to the state of original innocence.  That's the reason for that child in the Mass of Bernstein. 
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The people in the church did not only lose their faith which rested upon a display that acted as a support system; they lost their high.  They found themselves in the dark night.  They found just an external display and doubt crept in.  People thought it was sacred but it was made of cardboard.  The altar was made of a few boxes and the candles were made of wax.  They were in despair from having found they were depending upon outer conditions that could collapse.  The only way out of that dark night of doubt was to discover the sacred in the immaculate core of their being, which was the child.
It is the exaltation of the spirit which is productive of all beauty.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Our soul has a need for ecstasy.  We must give ourselves the chance to fulfill that need.  We can experience the emotion of vastness, and the exaltation of the emergence of our new being.  There's an ecstasy in recurrent rebirth because it carries the hope of a fresh beginning.  We are free from the past, free from conditioning.  We have the ability to make our real self break through all the obstacles which are counterproductive in our mind.  We accept the freedom that is offered us in becoming what we would like to become.  It's very daring, but it's real, and that is our true self.  We will find ourself in the transfigured world.
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The Flame of the Eternal Light

We have touched upon seeing ourselves as a pendulum, with one pole of our being moving in time and space and the other pole remaining stationary.  Let's explore this further, and see if we can identify with the whole pendulum.  There is a point at the end of its swing right and its swing left that is a state of suspense beyond time and space.  

Rebirthing takes place in that instant of time, because otherwise we would be the consequence of what we were in a causal chain.  We interrupt the conditioning of causality by the emergence of a fresh dispensation.  The Sufi dervishes treasure the instant of time that does not have any duration, and where the forward march of time is suspended. 

The instant of time is a sharp sword that cuts the guilt of the past and the prefiguration of the future.  That is not a philosophical statement; it is a psychological statement which has enormous implications.  Most of us feel that if we think in the sense of causality, we could never forgive ourselves and could never expect to be forgiven for our wrongdoings.  The instant of time is the Divine grace, the gratuitous Divine act which is not constrained by the law of causality.  It is the instant of freedom from that law.  If you think of the Kabalah, din represents law on their side and hasad or dulla represents that principle that is not restricted to law, a reprieve; magnanimity instead of holding people responsible for their guilt.  It is love instead of law.
Is law predominant, or love? Law is the habit; love is the being. Law is made; love was, is, and always will be.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We're touching upon something very important because we have to notice the difference between the moment of time and the instant of time.  For example, what we mean by now is the past overlapping with the future.  A note that we just heard in music continues to vibrate in our ears while we hear the next note.  There is an overlap.  One could prefigure what is the next note, if it is music of Bach for example, but the instant cuts the continuity.  There is no effect of the past upon the future. 

This can be illustrated by a wave on the sea.  The wave is a continuation of the previous wave, but at the same time the whole sea emerges as each wave.  There is both causality and free will, the unpredictable, both at the same time. 
The wave is the sea itself; yet, when it rises in the form of a wave, it is the wave; and when you look at the whole of it, it is the sea.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If there is even the slightest chance we can bring about a sudden change, a hiatus in our life is very important.  It is a pledge that turns a chapter in our lives.  The pledge happens in an instant.  It doesn't have any duration and marks a change from one  state to another, a threshold state. 
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We have a chance to make a pledge, and it's up to each of us to decide what pledge we will make.  There are two ways to do it.  One is to say we will not do something again, and the other one is to say we will do something.  We could even make two pledges.  Now you might ask, "Do you mean to say that by deciding not to do what I regret, that is going to absolve me from my guilt from having done it?"  It is a matter of how you think.  A more important question would be, "Can the present have a retroactive effect on the past?"

We always think we can't change the past.  The fact is that the past is in the present.  For example, if you look into the sky in the night time, most of the stars you see don't exist anymore, so you're looking into the past.  You only see the photons that have scattered and are diffusing in space.  A few of those photons are hitting your retina.  The star doesn't exist; it's scattered. 

We can experience that by thinking of ourselves as a beam of light, and the photons of our aura are hurtling into space.  We form a wave interference pattern with the photons of the stars.  Our being has impact upon the stars, and therefore has an impact upon the past.  That is such a solace to think that, by our pledge, we can effect the person we harmed in the past by improving that condition.  Of course we could simply write to that person if that person is still alive, or if not, we can still reach that person with our thoughts and say, "I'm sorry, please forgive me."  It is only authentic if we decide not to do it again, otherwise we're not really sorry. 

How it effects the future is that being a new person is going to alter our plans for the future.  The present has an impact on the future.
If you live in the vision of the past, dream on, do not open your eyes to the present. If you live in the eternal, do not worry about the morrow. But if you live for the time to come, do all you can to prepare for the future.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Let's do a practice now.  Inhale through the left nostril and be aware of yourself as a pendulum that swings from the left to the right.  As you hold your breath the motion of the pendulum is suspended.  Exhale through the right nostril.  Although the motion of the pendulum is suspended, the force instilled in the pendulum is going to continue to move upwards into eternity.  Now inhale through the right nostril and this is where you experience the pull of the future, that is your programming.  Hold your breath, and your pledge is going to change your programming.  Exhale through the left now; somehow the force that was set up in the pendulum is going to continue upwards into everlastingness. 

A mysterious thing happens after the pendulum has reached the end of its swing; there is a force that continues upwards.  It means whatever action has been performed in the world, and particularly whatever realization we have attained, will never get lost; it will only survive by being transmuted.  
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There is a feedback from the existential realm into the programming of the universe.  If there were not, there wouldn't be any point in anything we do; it would get lost.  That's what Jelaluddin Rumi means when he says, "Tonight the umpteen stars give birth to the life eternal."  The ephemery is eternalized.


The Perfume Lasts Forever 

Think in terms that we're all going to die some time.  There will be a transition.  All we've done in our life is not just gone and lost; that doesn't make any sense.  Think of an event that took place in your life where you learned something.  Perhaps you don't remember the event much, but what you learned is eternalized.  Pir-o-Murshid used the word 'everlasting' rather than eternal because it had a beginning and doesn't have an end.  It's not the same as eternal, which doesn't have a beginning or an end. 

That's what one means by resurrection.  Something happens in your memory.  You don't remember the contingent aspects of an event, but you remember the gist of the event.  Think of yourself as surviving death by becoming the perfume of what you are, and that perfume lasts forever.  The flowers are much smarter than us.  They have a precarious foothold on planet Earth, but they are able to transmute themselves into perfume.  That perfume lasts forever.  This means we develop the ability to think of ourselves as the essence of what we are.  It is precisely what is being done in alchemy.  

The first stage of alchemy is called 'solve,' distillation.  It was water.  Next it's become vapor, distillation.  If the flowers of Earth become perfume, then it doesn't really matter what happens to the flowers.  They can be thrown on the garbage heap because they continue to live as perfume.  It gives us a sense of freedom from the fear of death, which is one of the most basic human fears. 
Fear comes from ignorance. For instance, the soul is frightened on entering the body of matter; also, the soul does not know death, and so it is afraid.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Matter is converted into energy and electrons can be converted into photons.  That means the body can continue to live as light, in a very different mode.  The electrons and protons of the body live forever.  They are scattered but they don't die.  The memory of the totality of the body is still there, but it's widespread in space.  If we realize that space has no sense in the local laws of science, then we see that we survive.  We just don't survive located in space. 

It's a little bit more complex because the electrons can't send messages to each other due to the limitation of the speed of light, but they do communicate.  Electrons live as couples.  If one whirls to the right, the other whirls to the left.  They can't communicate if you separate them artificially, but if you change the whirl of one, the other changes its whirl; it's a paradox.  It just shows that our conception of death is simply ignorance.  I know it's very frightening to look at a body that's died, but that's just our point of view. 
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That is associated with this sense of our immortality.  In our meditation we get to that point when we shift our identity up the pendulum closer to the point that doesn't change.  We escape the entropy of disintegration by what is called negentropy, which is the opposite; increased information at the cost of the expenditure of energy.  There is a connection between science and what we are doing in our meditations. 

Be aware of your breathing.  After you inhale, try to sense all that has happened in your life.  Your realization is being transmuted and eternalized while life continues, therefore the pendulum descends again.  While something is going upwards, the pendulum keeps on moving. 

When the pendulum swings to the left, we are experiencing not only the impact of our pledge upon the past, but the impact of our pledge upon our prefiguration of the future upon the past.  Of course our plan does prefigure the future. 
My lifelong sorrow I forget when Thou castest Thy glance upon me. Time is not for me; one glimpse of Thy glorious vision maketh me eternal.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
At first we are thinking about the past.  We are thinking about our problems.  Maybe they happened a few minutes ago, but they're still the past.  It's an autopsy.  The way of overcoming this autopsy of the past is to foresee our future.  That's why Euler said, "The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past."  Remember that statement.  It means overcoming determinism by your free will, because the future depends upon your free will.  That is the victory of life.  That is what happened to Buddha at the end of his retreat.  He said, "I have overcome determinism."  It's called the cry of the lion, the affirmation, the victory over the samsaric wheel. 

Buddha said, "That which is of the nature does not contribute to the eternal." There seems to be a contradiction there.  How could that which doesn't change be altered by that which changes?  He is quite right, but there is a difference between the everlasting and the eternal.  You could illustrate it with a wheel.  The center of the wheel doesn't change but in some way the force that makes the wheel turn is centered in the wheel.  It's paradoxical. 

If that upward motion of the pendulum continues towards the right and reaches the zenith, it reprograms the whole process of becoming.  That's what happens when we breathe through both nostrils. 

Now breath through both nostrils.  We have two swings, right and left, and both reach upwards and meet at the top.  That does not represent eternity; the top of the circle represents everlastingness.  Eternity is the center of the circle.  
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When we hold our breath after inhaling through both nostrils, we experience eternity, the eternal center of our being.  Exhale.  When we turned within we found that we had our personal incentive.  Now we can see that our future is a blend between the programming of our being and our free will. 

We look at our life and our destiny, and sometimes it's all beyond our understanding, but somehow our intuition tells us that even though it seems totally incongruous, it makes ultimate sense. 
The closer one approaches reality, the nearer one comes to unity.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The point of eternity is the point where the irreconcilables can be reconciled.  We see the oneness behind the polarity.  There we see the unity between the non-becoming and the becoming.  That is beyond our understanding.  We lose any ability to fit meaningfulness into our mental constructs.  It's the dark night of understanding of St. John of the Cross.  When that happens, we're touching upon the reality behind our reality.

Make God a reality, and God will make you the truth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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The Path of Illumination

When love's fire produces its flame, it illuminates like a torch the devotee's path in life, and all darkness vanishes.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We desire illumination, but we need to attain illumination in life, rather than escape from life in the hope of finding it.  The lure of our ideal is at the horizon.  Pir-o-Murshid said that as we advance, the horizon advances.  We never reach it.  On one hand we keep that ideal in our heart, and on the other hand we ask ourselves in absolute honesty where that spillover of the things we don't like in the world occurs in ourselves.  As we become sensitive we tend to be more and more critical about the grossness, the vulgarity, the selfishness, the greed, the violence, the power trips, and the vanity in the world.  

Instead of saying what is it that you dislike in the world, ask yourself what is it in you that you dislike in the world.  It's possible there could be a spillover of the world into your psyche, because there is something in your psyche that corresponds with that spillover.  It matches.  Those are the things that are standing in the way of fulfilling our wishful thinking of attaining illumination.  It is wishful thinking until we have removed the obstacles.  We're entertaining an ideal, but there's no value if it's not a reality in our lives.

Once we have freed ourselves from it, we love the world.  Christ said, 'they are children, they don't know what they do'.  We love children, even when they're naughty.  

Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine Light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 In Pursuit of the Sacred 

In contrast, we could have some sense of what we mean by the sacred.  There's no way of defining it, but we could explore some clues.  I would say the feature that strikes me the most is the immaculate state, purity.  We need to discover that immaculate state in ourselves, which can never be defiled by all the psychological pollution we undergo.  It's still there within its defilement. 

That's one of the reasons why it's so important to build a temple in our subtle body, not just in the physical body, but also in our mind.  As Buddha said, the walls of that temple are the sentinels at the doors of perception.  There are also the sentinels in our own thinking, not just in relationship with the impressions accruing from outside.  When we turn within that temple we find our immaculate self, and that holiness we are seeking is already in us.  We have to discover it, and to do that we have to remove the veils which consist of all those things we denigrate in other people. 
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Innocence is the natural condition of the soul and the lack of innocence is a foreign element which the soul acquires after coming on Earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The first aspect of illumination, which is the immaculate state, goes together with the second aspect, innocence.  We are without defenses.  Our defense is the sentinel at the doors of perception until we don't need it anymore.  There are two processes which have been discussed; one is to protect ourselves against the impressions accruing from the outside, and the other one is to transmute those impressions instead of rejecting them.  

This is illustrated in a story.  The disciples of Christ were walking on the lane.  They came across a dead dog and the disciple said, "Oh, don't look Master, it looks awful."  He looked, of course, and said, "Yes, but it's teeth are so beautiful."  

See beauty where we see ugliness and where we would be judgmental of people.  Perhaps they have a gross exterior, but their beauty is hidden within.  There is a process whereby that ugliness is transmuted.  It's something that we must do on our own if we have a sense of the sacred in the depth of our being.  We transmute our impressions of the world.  In the depth of our being we only imbibe the quintessence, which is beautiful. 
Beauty is hidden in every soul, however wicked; and our trust and confidence in the beauty of the soul helps to draw out that hidden beauty which must shine out one day.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
The third aspect is unselfishness, the way of the Saint.  It goes beyond the ethics of not involving ourselves in greed; it can exact the toll of sacrifice and selflessness if we are in the pursuit of the sacred.  Otherwise, we just seek our interests in life.  It doesn't fit into the kind of programming of our lives; spirituality is another dimension, it's not something we can reconcile.  

The temple we create is a space for the sacred.  It is composed essentially of walls, but those walls can have windows in them.  The walls represent a threshold, the passage from the profane to the sacred that is protecting the immaculate state of our being from the defilement of the way of the world.  Eventually, the walls of the temple extend or even break down, like the wall of Berlin.  Ultimately there's room for everything in the temple.  

The power of the sacred prevails over the sins of the world.  We can see it ourself.  Protecting the sacred isn't simply guarding ourselves against the profane or the sacrilege, it's only meaningful in the Divine consciousness.  The temple is there for the Divine Presence, not for ourselves.

I'm very wary of using the word God, because as Pir-O-Murshid said, when we use the word God, we don't realize what we mean.  We have to be very careful with that word.  That's why the Buddhists are so very careful of that word, of course, or don't even use it.
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Understanding that dimension frees us from identification with our individual self.  I don't see how we could do that unless we are open to this infinite dimension, which we call God.  It's not just infinite because that would be a quantitative dimension.  It is superlative, paramount; the very paradigm of excellence. 
My lips hold the prayer in them as the rosebud hold fragrance in its heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Now prayer is projecting excellent qualities in ourselves that we are awakening and transmuting upon our representation of God.  It has an operational value.  Otherwise, we would be trying to obtain illumination for ourselves, which is the ultimate selfishness.  Think of the implications of that when you look at the things pursued in different religions and in different schools.  Pir-o-Murshid says that the first step is the concept of God, the second step is the experience, and the third one is awakening to the God within.  

No one is able to detect the awakening of God within.  We are the subject experiencing other than ourself experiencing God.  We don't experience God, but clues are there.  Pir-o-Murshid says the objective of the whole of existence is the awakening of the Divine consciousness of the universe, which is hidden in matter.   Our bodies participate in our experience and that's the reason for the Dhikr.  The body is being transformed while participating in the building of the temple.  Body faculties that are not generally utilized awaken.  Now that's awakening the God within.  
God is within you; you are His instrument, and through you He expresses Himself to the external world.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
A practical application of this could be when you're talking to a person who was absolutely caught up in the usual way of thinking in the world.  You don't want to be standoffish or sanctimonious and judgmental.  How do you do it?  Do you play the game like you would with children?  How do you keep your attunement?  

See what mode of thinking is at play in that pursuit of worldly interest.  A few years ago I was visiting a rishi in a cave in the Himalayas.  I was with a group of people, because it was a very dangerous jungle.  One of the members of the group asked that rishi what, in my mind was a stupid question.  The rishi was in his state of ecstasy and I could see him trying to come down into the mind of that person to try to understand how he could possibly think the way he was thinking.  That illustrates exactly what we need to do if we want to maintain the attunement of the sacred.  
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While you're talking to people you can see the motivation behind what they are saying, if you have the same motivation.  If you're pursuing the sacred, then you've got to do something about it.  Be careful because this could lead to being judgmental.  The way out of the vicious circle is not by the pursuit of freedom, although that would be the first conclusion.  Freedom from commission certainly plays a role, but the answer is love, caring for others. 
There is no greater phenomenon than love itself.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
Disparaging greed is still negative, even disparaging it in ourselves.  We cannot overcome those elements in ourselves that we attribute to the world by wanting to free ourselves from them.  It doesn't work.  They would come back in some way.  We have to really care for people, because then we make the necessary adjustments in ourselves.

Look at your motivations in your relationships with people.  Are you trying to get something out of them, or are you giving them something?  Are you creating a gulf between you and them, or are you seeing their real being behind the surface by mirroring it in yourself?  They can discover themselves through you, and they will be able to go through the same process you are going through in your quest for the sacred, because it's difficult for people to admit it.  If you could probe the depth of the deepest feelings of people, the need for the sacred is absolutely overwhelming.  It's just that it doesn't seem realistic.  People don't know how to do it. 

We are called upon to do without support systems because the support systems at our disposal have become less and less effective.  It's very rare to find a situation that is so holy that we are moved in the depth of our being.  We need to create the sense of the sacred out of our own being and not rely upon outward support.  It's a matter of being conscious of it all the time in the course of everyday life. The spiritual challenge of our time is more exacting than anything in the past.

 Attuning to the Sacred 

Now I want us to do a few practices that will help us create that sense of the sacred.  Let's start with a simple review of previous meditations and build from there.  Imagine your eyes as the head lamps of a car piercing through the dark.  As you inhale, turn the beams upwards and converge them, and as you exhale, bring them down again.  They separate into two beams and cast forward.  

Look within and pass through the different chakras,  by first being aware of the colors and then concentrate on the colorless light in the crown.  Imagine the beam of light descending through the fontanel.  Now instead of thinking of the colors, think of the different spheres of light experienced by Hildegaard.  

As you inhale, be aware that you are making quantum leaps; you are shifting from one sphere of light to the next.  Hold your breath, and begin to grasp that your intelligence is like the nature of non-physical light.  Exhale, and be aware that your intelligence has now become consciousness.  
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It is the soul's light which is natural intelligence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we hold our breath we toggle from identifying with our aura to identifying with pure luminous intelligence.  This intelligence is beginning to turn towards the existential world and is perceiving it; this is a totally new way of looking at things.  Our own consciousness is passive, receptive, and we are exposed to the reflected, refracted or fluoresced light from the environment.  We are looking at things by casting a light upon things.  Don't think of our eyes as being receptive organs of perception, think of them as the lamp of Aladdin that thrusts its light upon all objects to make them reveal their true nature, almost like an x-ray.  We could call that active looking.  There is a deeper secret at this level of the psyche.  We are recognizing in the objects an archetypal matching that is written right into our own being. 

We have to make a distinction.  There is the knowledge we acquire by perceiving and interpreting what we perceive, and the inherent knowledge that is revealed to us that we just know, we intuit it.  

Now the way to access this second mode of cognizance is to think that our mind is part of the mind of God.  The universe is endowed with consciousness.  We are part of this consciousness and have access to this storehouse of knowledge of the universe.  For example, Pir-o-Murshid says, "What we think are our thoughts are the way that humanity thinks," but I am paraphrasing of course; it is customized in our particular mode of thinking.  That is a clue, because instead of saying to ourselves, "I think," say as Newton said, "I think as God thinks."  

God is the universe, of which the cosmos is the body, and which is endowed with consciousness, awareness, knowledge, being, and so on.  That consciousness is  holistically a fragment of that totality, as David Bohm says, "a relatively autonomous expression of that totality," so that we are always connecting our mind with the mind of the universe. 
In order to acquire spiritual knowledge, in order to receive inspiration, in order to prepare one's heart for the inner revelation, one must try to make one's mentality pliable, like water rather than like a rock.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Imagine to yourself, "If my consciousness is one of the focalizations of the consciousness of the universe, then the universe knows itself through that expression of itself which is my consciousness.  That means my knowledge is fed back into the knowledge of the universe."  Our knowledge of the universe accrues to the knowledge the universe has of itself.

This is a level of thinking beyond a commonplace way of thinking because if we identify with our personal self, the knowledge we have of life in general is limited to that particular vantage point.  In high states of meditation, we can downplay the knowledge we acquire through our personal vantage point, and consequently this  transcendental knowledge begins to reveal itself.  This knowledge is the revealed knowledge instead of the acquired knowledge.  Ibn Arabi said, "Knowledge is a veil upon the known."  This is the Jabarut level, beyond the celestial level, Malakut.
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The implicate knowledge is revealed, and is of a different nature to the personal one, because one is thinking in terms of archetypes.  For example, somebody comes into the room and is very peaceful, and we say, "what a peaceful person."  The dervish would say, "Isn't it wonderful to see the Divine peace coming through this person."  That is thinking in terms of the archetype.  We can reach a point where we are always seeing things from this overview, as though we had raised our consciousness from the limitation incurred at the existential level.  These are steps that lead towards samadhi.  There are clues to this in the words of Buddha, "This is beyond existence, beyond consciousness, beyond existence and non-existence and ultimately beyond dichotomy, consciousness or non-consciousness."  Of course this is baffling to our minds, but it's just a way of trying to say something that one can't say.  It gives us a sense of not relying upon the limiting knowledge we acquire of things.
The mystic does not possess knowledge, for he is knowledge himself.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This goes together with the notion of our identity.  People identify themselves with the personal self-image.  The soul identifies itself with its support system.   

Imagine if we are able to retrieve the memory of our prenatal, or perinatal condition as Dr. Groff calls it, that is prior, not only to our birth but actually to our conception.  Move back in time and you might recover the memory of how you descended through the spheres.  We haven't really descended in terms of space, but consciousness has awakened gradually into the perspective of the existential condition, which has a limited scope of consciousness.  As an illustration, it is as though we have accumulated the fabric of the planes we descended through, and we started identifying with that fabric.  We identify with the personality, the mind, the  body, and of course with our consciousness.  When someone says, "I am sad, I am glad," and so on, it is the body, the mind, and the personality that is experiencing it.

This is linked with our sense of our inheritance, because we've been built up to think we are the children of our parents, our grandparents and ancestors.  There's no doubt that we exhibit features of these predecessors, but as we get into a very high state of consciousness, we can discover a more universal inheritance which Pir-o-Murshid calls the Divine inheritance.  
Divinity is the exhaltation of the human soul.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
That's why St. Francis said, "I have another Father."  The features of our parents and forefathers inheritance is more superficial.  Our being is covered over by the features of that inheritance, and much deeper is the inheritance beyond existence; that's really what is meant by Divine.  Buddhists call it the 'extra-samsaric' element.  It is not of the nature of the samsaric wheel, the repetition and even evolution; it's of the nature of eternity.  Once we do that, we come to a point in a very high state of meditation where we think of ourself as a continuity in change.  There is a permanence behind that, not just changes but the evolution of my being.
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We want to have some sense of our imperishability, because we are used to the thought that people die, because we don't see them anymore.  Nothing is lost in the universe.  The flowers continue to live as perfume, everlastingly.  We can really start grabbing hold of that thread of our being that is not subject to mortality or perishability.  Remember that the soul thinks it is sad, happy, and so on because it identifies with the body.  The illusion is not that the physical world is not what it is, the illusion is what we think we are ourselves.  Just imagine that you awaken from your self-image, and you think, "I thought I was what I thought I was, and now I realize it was just a certain kind of perspective which was very limited."
By self-realization a man becomes larger than the universe. The world in which he lives becomes as a drop in the ocean of his heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Do the practice shaghal.  Inhale through the right nostril, not the left and exhale through the right, not the left, and hold your breath in-between.  Breath through your right nostril three times in that position and then take your hands away.  Concentrate on the subliminal all-pervading light that emerges from within while you hold your breath.  As you exhale concentrate on the heart center, which includes the solar plexus.

Of course you know at the subliminal level, the all-pervading light is light in the implicate state.  It is changed into radiant light, and you imagine the switch takes place as you move your attention from the solar plexus to the heart center.  Now, instead of concentrating on the solar plexus and then the heart as you exhale, concentrate above your crown center as you hold your breath, and concentrate upon your glance as you exhale.  When you concentrate above your crown center, make that quantum leap and discover yourself to be pure luminous intelligence.  As you exhale, your intelligence seems to brighten your glance.
Intelligence is the light of life, the life of life, and the essence of the whole Being.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We are ready for the advanced stages in the Dhikr.   The Dhikr is the practice that gives us a support system.  It's not quite like going to the church or sitting on a prayer carpet, but it does affect one very deeply.  As a quick review, we circle with our head and our chest, moving our head toward the left shoulder, left knee, right knee, right shoulder and up to the zenith.  As we do that the motion of the body has the effect of expanding our consciousness, our sense of identity, our ability to get into the consciousness of the universe.  Consequently, we free ourselves from our limited assessment of our problems.  
Page 49
Next we bring our head down towards the solar plexus.  We exhale in the circle and inhale as the head comes down, and that is the effect of making our consciousness turn within.  We downplay the impact of not only the perception of the environment, but the impact of the environment upon us by placing sentinels at the doors of perception in our minds.  We are pulled into the void and into the vacuum in the center of the vortex.  As the head comes up, slightly moving from the solar plexus upwards to the heart, we experience the reverse; the emergence of new dispensation of our being, a rebirthing.  We capture that rebirthing or it would be stillborn. 
The first birth is the birth of man; the second birth is the birth of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The universe has the faculty of self-organizing itself in each fragment of itself, but to be creative we need to participate in our creativity.  At some point we need to customize that self-organizing faculty by our personal incentive.  Using our creative imagination we project how one could be if one would be as one might be.  It needs to be very concrete, we imagine our face or personality as it could be.  That's the only way to pull out of the past and evolve; otherwise we remain the same, or could even go backwards, becoming bitter and self-destructive.

The head lifts itself further and further up, and in doing so it passes the different planes in review.  We are raising our consciousness above the limitation of earthly conditions, from one plane to the other, step-by-step.  There are many planes, so to simplify things, the step after imagining the new configuration of our being as it could be, is to identify with our aura.  Concentrate on the heart center, and fashion your aura of light.  Our thoughts build this image of ourselves in the world of light.

We have to include all the levels of our being to be creative; it's not good enough just to concentrate on whatever is emerging from within.  That's why we review one level after the other in the ascent.  The clue to lifting our consciousness upwards is glorification.  We carry a nostalgia within us for excellence, for perfection, for beauty, for the sublime.  We carry within our minds the ability to imagine infinity and eternity.  In the same way we have that capacity to imagine a more excellent quality than we've imagined so far.  We can be absolutely amazed by the miracle of life; the beauty that emerges out of our beingness, the whole manifestation breaking through the veils. 
It is those who have touched the inner beauty who are able to appreciate beauty in all forms.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The brain starts by simply bewondering, bemusing, and then it reaches further into glorification.  We project upon a fictitious representation we make of God that's not God.  We project the qualities we feature in our own personality into that representation.  Somehow the superlative of those qualities in their perfection is in infinite regress.  When we reach that sense of perfection, it's like raising to more advanced levels.  We think we've really reached it, but as Pir-o-Murshid says, "God is the horizon, you will never reach it."  
Page 50
That act of glorification still has the effect of arousing and awakening in us qualities that are somnolent, latent, and which become actuated and activated, so our prayers are full of self-discovery and  self-actuation. 
The deeper your prayers echo in your own consciousness, the more audible they are to God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Dhikr starts by building the temple and eventually as the head rises up, we become the priest or the priestess in the temple.  We have created a sacred space, and we see we are the temple, as a priestess glorifying God.  Proceed upwards and our consciousness is lifted above the limitation of our worldly conditions.  All the images we have acquired prove to be relatively worthless.  At that level in the dark night of understanding, the intuitive faculty begins to break through and all of a sudden we see things in a way we've never seen before.  That's awakening at the level called Jabarut, where we identify with our more essential inheritance, the Divine inheritance instead of ancestral.  It's beyond the Divine programming, it's the Divine intention.  Things that don't make sense start making sense, and as Pir-o-Murshid says, "That's the way the defeat avers itself to be a victory."

We're pretty high as it is, but there's one more step we could have any sense of, and that is samadhi, awakening from the unreality.  It's the final awakening.  As the Hindus say in the Upanishad, "It happens as a flash, unexpectedly and passes before you realize it."  When you realize it you try to recapture it and then it's too late, but it's like seeing back stage of the universe.  From the time you've had the flash of realization, you're never the same person.  

Think again of the words of Buddha, "Beyond existence, beyond nonexistence, beyond consciousness and unconsciousness."  His last words at the moment of illumination were, "It is in the roar of the lion that I found the way to liberation," and he said, "It is the cessation of the determined of the conditioning; it is the ultimate freedom."  He is talking about involvement, freedom from the narrowness, freedom from illusion, freedom from personal identity, even the known is freed from the knowing.  It is a state prior to the planning. 

Try to remember even just a few of those thoughts.  They act as catalysts to growth through realization.  Do the Dhikr once more, a three-quarters circle as you exhale,  now the head comes down as you inhale facing the solar plexus, and continue to inhale as the head moves up from one chakra to the next, eyeballs turned upwards, and now hold your breath.  

It's very subtle, but right at the end of the inhaling comes the "h" of the word Allah.  That extra-samsaric element of eternity is not of the nature of becoming, it's a point of samadhi.  When you hold your breath, you awaken in life.  Pir-o-Murshid describes it again when he says, "You realize that you came on earth in order to discover your spirit." and, "Consciousness awakens in matter where it has been buried for eons of time."   
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Concentrate on the heart center when you hold your breath, after having lifted your head upwards to the "h."  Now concentrate on your heart.  Open your eyes when you exhale, but still remain awake.  Stop making the motion of the body, but maintain the thoughts corresponding to your exhaling and inhaling and holding the breath.  Cease thinking of your breath, and just be very aware, very awake.  Don't slip back into your ordinary consciousness again, or identify with your personal vantage point.  

You see the miracle of life appearing in events, you see people as a condition of God, just like waves are a condition of the sea.  The everywhere and always is present in the here and now.  Eternity in a terminal act and infinity in a finite act.

You never slip totally back into your ordinary consciousness.  There's always that sense of having seen behind the curtain and you will never forget it.  God bless you.


Hoax of the Mind

by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan



Inspired by the Teaching of
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Copyright (c) 1997  Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
All rights reserved


First Edition, July 1997

The material in this volume was drawn from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in February and March, 1997, at the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York;  Seattle, Washington; and Tucson, Arizona. 

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 


Page 1

	
Self Deception

Every man has to be self-asserting, continually guarding his interests in order to live. There are many who toil from morning till evening, guarding their self-interest and thinking about nothing else. And what is it all for? In order to exist. But even germs and grubs exist and enjoy life much better! Birds fly in the air and are quite happy; but man is loading his heart with a thousand troubles, making his responsibili-ties greater and greater. And in the end he gains nothing; his health is spoiled, his spirit wrecked. He does not know any more where he is, nor where his spirit is; and if he has nothing here he has nothing in the hereafter. Many die without ever having given a thought to the deeper side of life. Not that they did not care for it; but they could not find time for it; they had too much to do in life.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


Survey the circumstances in which we have involved ourselves, or in which we are involved -  in our relationship to this person, and that person, and the other person, and to our job, to our undertaking, whatever it is, our home, our  support system.  Ask, why am I doing this? Why am I doing that? What do I expect of this particular person or that particular person?  How am I behaving toward that person?  What are the motivations behind my behavior toward that person?  This is called Muhasabi, which is the examination of conscience.

Of course, the answers are very complex, because the mind plays a lot of games upon us.  The first thing to highlight is, "What are the values that I esteem above other values?"  We can make a real priority list of values.  Then we ask, "Am I jeopardizing the higher values for values that are less important? Is that due to circumstances that exact my meeting them at the cost of my being able to pursue those values that I prioritized?  Or is it because those values low down on my list, that don't have top priority, are still valuable for me?"  We have personal needs and spiritual needs.  It is sometimes not very easy to distinguish between them.  

 Shahabbudin said the most pertinent thing, "...the support system takes over..."  
That is, all that it takes to be able to survive in our society, is so demanding that we have no time to give expression and fulfillment, to that which we value most.  
Page 2
If this goes on and we reach the age of 80, we run the risk of dying in despair, unless we have given satisfaction to the highest item on our priority list.  There's no point trying to define it, because words are like cliches.  I'm rather weary of words.


We may answer, "Yes, of course, I'm not very clear about what those highest priorities are."  If we are aware of words, then we're quite right in saying that. We can use the words illumination, and awakening, and ecstasy, and all that, but unfortunately these words  are inadequate in the sense that they're concepts of the mind.  We must talk about real things rather than concepts of the mind.

We may answer, "Yes, but you see in order to fulfill those needs, I need circumstances that can promote them or pave the way to them. The circumstances of everyday life do not favor them." Suppose we were living as a monk in Mount Athos, or in a cave in the Himalayas, or in a community which is very highly dedicated to a spiritual ideal.  Then we would have a support system for our attunement.  

This is cutting right into the issue of the retreat process. It is helpful to have this support,  an environment that is dedicated to our spiritual ideal. That's one reason we goe to church, for example.  We need a support system.  The Sufis, however, are nomads. They can't rely upon a temple or a mosque or synagogue. Therefore, they have to create a temple out of their own body. 

We need to learn how we can introduce the sacred into everyday life, instead of escaping from everyday life in a vain attempt to find the sacred without any support system, and neglecting our responsibilities in life. That is the rub. That is the real challenge of life.  We are dedicated to our ideal and find that it is very difficult to put into practice.  

This would all be reasonably clear if it weren't for the fact that what we perceive as the prevailing circumstances, the social conditions in which we're living, is very often made up of our own projections, and self deceptions, and vanities.  

We think it is the world that is our prison, whereas the prison is in our way of thinking and of feeling. This leads to a lot of misconceptions, because it leads to our denigrating ourselves. We are apt to give up any hope of being able to fulfill our ideal, because we think we have been defiled, that we have jeopardized our chance of attaining illumination.  We get caught in a way of thinking that can only lead to despair unless we know how to get out of that vicious circle.  A vicious circle is exactly what Buddha calls the samsaric wheel.  

Of course, in its simpler interpretation, the samsaric wheel is that situation in which we find ourselves, in which we go through life without ever improving.  In fact, it might be the other way around.  Often I see purity and light in the eyes of a child, and then I see that people grow bitter when they go through a mid-life crisis.  Somehow they have given up the battle.  They couldn't see the way out of the vicious circle.  
Page 3
A retreat is an opportunity to reflect upon our lives and see exactly where we got caught, and how we can find - I won't say a way out;  I don't like the word escape -  a way of upgrading that circle.  Let's say we can allow the circle become a spiral instead of a circle.  For example, evolution is a way in which the circle is somehow circumvented.  There's no point in a seed becoming a plant and in turn becoming a seed, and a plant, and so on. That's a samsaric wheel. Evolution represents a further dimension, our ability to improve, and get out of that vicious circle.  

It is the prospect of what the future could be that helps us out of the circle.  It's a slogan that I've often referred to. The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past.  The push of the past is our conditioning.  The pull of the future is a strange phrase, because we must assume the future is there, already there. We create it, and therefore it is a feature of our freedom against conditioning.  

Freedom would be the way out of the circle, but we have to be very careful with what we mean by freedom. Are we talking about the freedom of, for example, our ego?  According to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, our ego is only a very small fraction of what we are.

It may be that one is seeking freedom from having to work; another may be seeking freedom by getting away from some influence which surrounds him; perhaps another seeks freedom from a national point of view. But they each and all strive continually for freedom, and what gives the incentive to strive after freedom is the unconscious craving which the infant feels from the moment of its birth. That is why man is continually striving, knowingly or unknowingly, to attain to that freedom.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
  
The word freedom makes our heart beat faster because, somehow unconsciously, we do have a sense of being constrained by circumstances. We put the blame for  the constraint in our freedom upon our circumstances. It looks at first as though circumstances are standing in the way of our freedom,  until we realize that if we change, circumstances change.  They have to change because circumstances are the product of a relationship between ourselves and the environment.  If we change, then circumstances are going to have to change.  So our freedom is in our ability to change ourselves, but how do we do it?  
Page 4
In the teachings of the Hindus and the Buddhists, the first step is freeing our assessment of the physical world. I would call this our assessment of our problems.  Freeing our  assessment of our problems from our personal bias. That personal bias is maya.  It's not that the world is delusive.  It is our personal bias towards reality that is not only illusion, but our self-deception. Our assessment of our problems is not one hundred percent reliable. There's a personal bias in it.

I am wary of any teaching that asks, "How do you feel?"  because how we feel is grounded upon our very limited conception of ourselves.  Therefore our response could draw us even more deeply into illusion.

Our illusion and our deceptions are part of our defenses.  We fool ourselves, but maybe that's the way we protect ourselves, until we don't need that kind of protection any longer because we have been able to unveil the hoax. We need to look at our problems and see the constraint they are imposing upon us, at least upon our way of thinking.  The way that we are constrained in our freedom is a function of our assessment of them.  It's not the problems.  It's our assessment that's the constraint. 

The first step is freeing our assessment of our problems from our personal bias.  What do our problems mean to us? That's the personal bias.  To free ourselves from personal bias, we have to extend our assessment beyond our personal interest.  What we want to do is see what the problem is in itself, irrespective of our personal point of view. 

One of the intermediary steps is to start looking at it from the point of view of another person.  Start with the person with whom we are involved in that problem.  Obviously that person is seeing the problem from his/her point of view and we're seeing the problem from our point of view.  So we have expanded our consciousness a little bit.It doesn't mean that the way another person sees our problem is more right than the way we see it. It is just another vantage point that helps us free ourselves from the limitation of our own vantage point and therefore our own assessment. Now we can include the viewpoint of a third person indirectly involved in the problem, and a fourth, and so on.  

We come to realize that it is not our problem, but our problem spills over in the whole universe.  We are participating in the drama of the universe, and we think it's our problem.  "Why is it happening to me?" If we just look at it from our personal vantage point, we are caught in a prison. The real prison is our personal point of view. It's not the circumstances.  If we continue including more and more people, ad infinitum, in infinite regress then we begin to understand the words of Saint Francis of Assisi when he said, "I thought I was looking at the world, but the world is looking at me."

Our personal bias is based upon our values, so we come back to our first question. What are we looking for in life?  What is our objective?  What are the values that we pursue?
Page 5
In our problems, two things are integrated in some way.  One is circumstances that we believe are fortuitous: It was an accident, a situation we could hardly say we chose. Seen from our personal bias, of course, these are circumstances that had been wreaked upon us by destiny, and there's no way we can alter them.  There may be cases where we did trigger off a whole causal chain which led to those circumstances that escaped unnoticed.  It's possible.  

The other is circumstances we have created the way a spider has woven its web. Now we live in that web. We've created our circumstances and what we sow, we reap.  We have built our own prison. That's the way that circumstances appear existentially.  

The impact of our personal vantage point, our personal bias, is a function of what we value in life.  A very pertinent example is Buddha, who gave up all his kingdom,  all his possessions, and all future possessions. There are some people who, if they lose a million dollars, will commit suicide.  It just depends upon what we value.  Our assessment of our problems is related to the things we really value. It also depends upon the stage where we are in our lives,  and it has to do with our realization of what has ultimate value.  

We could contrast it with worthlessness or shame. That's rather an extreme, opposite pole of what we value. If we look around, we see people fretting about worthless things -- trying to acquire them, fretting because they lost them.  Shame, a waste of time, they are, as the Sufis say, "picking up the crumbs."  We're invited to the banquet and we are picking up the crumbs on the floor.  As Murshid says, "we are offered pearls and we choose pebbles."  

Remember that our assessment of our problems is a function of what we value.  Nobody can tell us what we have to value.  It depends upon our own assessment.  

I assume we are on this path together because we have a need for the sacred.  There are all kinds of words, like awakening, and illumination, stress reduction, and so on. Really, these are objectives, different objectives that are pursued in different spiritual groups. As we grow in realization, however, we realize that the ultimate value is sacredness.  

Our self-esteem depends upon our ability to give expression to that need for the sacred; so it's very serious.  It would be a perfunctory behavior to escape from life in the quest of the sacred, to become a nun or a monk.  I'm not even sure we can always find the sacred in the ashrams in India, but it is a quest for the sacred that causes a lot of people to leave the world.  As Buddha says, there's a place you can't reach by going anywhere.  The thing is, how do we find it in ourselves? 

Page 6

The Price of Freedom

But why must man suffer and sacrifice for God? At the end of his suffering and sacrifice he will find that though he began to do so for God, it has proved to be for himself. It is the foolishly selfish who is selfish, and the wisely selfish proves to be selfless. 
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

There is a spillover from the way of the world.  There's a spillover that happens surreptitiously without our realizing it.  Then we denigrate ourselves because we're not fulfilling our highest ideal, our highest passion.  That's a word used by Murshid, a real passion for the unattainable.  It's got to be so strong that it preempts anything else in the world.  

We feel that we've been somehow defiled.  This is because we don't realize there's been a spillover.  The spillover came because there are things in us that wanted what the world had to offer.  So it's a matter of prioritizing what we value, once more, against the things that will seem to give us some kind of personal satisfaction.  Is it possible to reconcile the two?  

I think the answer is in the words of Christ, "They are in the world, but not of the world."  We have to be very clear what that means. What does it mean to be of the world?  When he talks about another kingdom, the kingdom of God,  what does that mean? We need to define what is meant by the world, because it is not the circumstances.  That's a confusion.  It is the pursuit of what we consider to be our personal interest at the expense of others: selfishness, and greed.  At what point does need become greed? Where is that line of demarcation?  

When we're walking in the streets and see the homeless, do we wonder whether they are the victims of greed?  Do we wonder whether we have had anything to do with that? That's what I mean by the weight of the world.  It's complicated, being caught in the system, but somehow, our society is geared in a way that what started by being needs (the support system) has become greed.  The word used by Buddha is concupiescence, wanting to have, to possess just for the sake of possession, not because it's a need. Not too many of us are over-rich or suffer from an excess of opulence, but still, for each one of us the dividing line between need and greed is important, and on retreat we can ask ourselves that question.  
Page 7
We become addicted to the support system.  We don't know how we could live without it. It's become very convenient to have the technology of our time.  I remember walking in the Himalayas, when I was younger, with a very heavy backpack filled with all the things I thought I needed, gradually dumping one after another along the way, and finding it, of course, much easier to walk.  We think we need those things.  The sanyassins harden themselves against cold and heat. That's what the homeless do nowadays, survive up to a point.

Well, these are the big questions.  What am I doing in life?  It is selfishness to pursue freedom from our responsibility in life. We need to attain illumination in life, rather than escaping from life in the hope of finding illumination.  We have to be very careful of our concept of realization. Our quest is illumination, but we don't know what it means.  Likewise, we can't know what awakening means unless we are awakened.  Just a definition of it is of no use.  

It's true that the lure of our ideal is at the horizon. As Pir-o-Murshid said, the horizon advances as we advance. We never reach it.  That's why he calls it a quest for the unattainable.

On one hand we keep that in our heart,  and on the other hand we ask ourselves, but it requires absolute honesty, "Where does that spillover of the things I don't like in the world, that I attribute to the world, where does that occur in me?"  

We can't just blame the world and have disparaging thoughts about the world.  It's true that as we become sensitive we may become more and more judgemental and critical about the grossness, the vulgarity, the selfishness, the greed, the violence, the power trips, and vanity that we see.  That's what we mean by the world.  

Of course, it's easy to criticize it in what we call the world.  We project it in the world. If it's possible for there to be a spillover of the world into our psyche, it is because there is something in our psyche that corresponds with what spills over.  It matches. 

Instead of asking, "What is it that I dislike in the world?" the question now becomes, "What is it in me that I dislike in the world?"  Once we have freed ourselves from this, we find we can love the world. As Christ said, "They are children.  They don't know what they do." We love children.  They're naughty and we still love them.

These are the things that are standing in the way of our fulfilling our wishful thinking, of attaining illumination. It is wishful thinking until we have removed the obstacles. It is a platonic ideal,  not a reality.  We fool ourselves. We're entertaining an ideal, paying lip service to that ideal, but there's no value if it's not a reality in our lives.
Page 8
In contrast, could we just have some sense of what we mean by the sacred?  There's no way of defining it, but there are some clues. The feature that strikes me the most is the immaculate state, purity.  We should be doing this in the course of our practice of the Dhikr, when we turn within.  

We must discover that immaculate state in ourselves, which can never be defiled by all the psychological pollution that we undergo.  It's still there within its defilement.  

That is one of the reasons why it's so important to build a temple, not just in the physical body, and in the subtle body,  but also in our mind, and then turning within that temple and finding our real self immaculate.  The holiness we are seeking is already in us,  but we have to discover it.  To discover it, we have to remove the veils which are all those things we denigrate in the world, and in other people.
When the soul is evolved it feels by itself. In other words it becomes conscious of its purity, of its majesty, of its eternal life, of its bliss, of its inspiration and of its power. Such is the original mind of man and such its natural condition. It is not sin that is original but purity, the original purity of God Himself. But as the mind grows and is fed by the life in the world, unnatural things are added to it and for the moment these additions seem desirable, useful, or beautiful; they build another kind of mind which is sometimes called the ego or the false self. They make man clever, learned, brilliant, and many other things; but above and beyond all is the man of whom it can be said that he is pure-minded.
							 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Innocence goes together with the immaculate state.  We are without defenses.  We place the sentinel at the doors of perception, and that is our defense.  We need a defense until we don't need it anymore. There are two processes.  One is protecting ourselves against the deleterious impressions accruing from the outside and in your own mind. The other is transmuting those impressions instead of rejecting them.  

This is illustrated in a story from the Apocrypha, The disciples of Christ were walking on the lane and there was a dead dog. A disciple said, "Oh, don't look Master, it looks, it's awful." Christ looked, of course, all the same, and he said, "Yes, but it's teeth are so beautiful."  

This illustrates the ability to see beauty where others see ugliness, and where others would be judgemental of people.  Perhaps they have a gross exterior, but
their beauty is hidden within.  What is more, there is a process whereby that ugliness is transmuted.  
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It's something we can do on our own, if we have a sense of the sacred in the depth of our being. We transmute our impressions of the world so we only imbibe, in the depth of our being, the quintessence, which is beautiful, like the perfume of flowers.   

A further aspect is unselfishness, the way of the Saint.  It goes beyond just the ethics of not involving ourselves in greed, it can exact the toll of sacrifice and selflessness. 
God's goodness is something that one cannot learn to know at once; it takes time to understand it. But little actions of kindness which we receive from those around us we can know, and we can be thankful if we want to be. In this way man develops gratefulness in his nature, and expresses it in his thought, speech, and action as an exquisite form of beauty. As long as one weighs and measures and says, 'What I have done for you' and, 'What have you done for me', 'How kind I have been to you' and 'How good have you been to me', one wastes one's time disputing over something which is inexpressible in words; besides one closes by this that fountain of beauty which rises from the depth of one's heart.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
This is all only true if we are in the pursuit of the sacred.  Otherwise, it seems correct to seek our interest in life. Spirituality doesn't fit into the worldly programming of our lives. It's another dimension. Therefore, we cannot reconcile these needs.  

In the temple, we are creating a space for the sacred, but that space is circumscribed by the walls. Eventually the walls of the temple extend or even break down, like the Berlin Wall.  Eventually, there's room for everything in the temple.  

Somehow the power of the sacred prevails over the the sins of the world.  We can see it ourselves.  The power of the sacred somehow overwhelms what we call sin in our emotions.  The sacred can't be simply protecting ourselves against the profane or sacrilege. It is only meaningful in the Divine consciousness.  

The temple is there for the Divine presence.  That's what it's there for.  It's not there for ourselves.  

What does the Divine presence mean? Whatever we mean by it is not reliable anyway.  It might even be deceptive.  I'm very wary of using the word God.  Pir-o-Murshid said when we use the word God, we don't realize that what we mean is what we mean by God, instead of what is God.  So we have to be very careful with that word.  That's why the Buddhists are so very careful of that word,  or don't even use it.
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The dimension of the sacred frees us from identification with our individual self. don't see how we could free ourselves from our identification with our individual self unless we are open to this infinite dimension, which we call God.  But it's not just infinite, that would be a kind of quantitative dimension. It is superlative; it is paramount.  It's the very paragon of what we mean by excellence.  

In prayer, we are projecting upon our representation of God excellent qualities in ourselves that we are awakening and transmuting.  It has an operational value.  Otherwise, we would be trying to obtain illumination for ourselves, which is the ultimate selfishness.  

Think of the implications of that when we look at the kind of things that are pursued in different religions and in different meditation schools andspiritual groups . Pir-o-Murshid says the concept of God is the first step. The second is the experience of God,  and the third is awakening to the God within.  

When we are the subject, experiencing God as other than ourselves, we are not experiencing God, but whatever clues are there. Pir-o-Murshid says the objective of the whole of existence is the awakening of the Divine consciousness, the consciousness of the universe, which is hidden in matter.  

Our bodies participate in our experience.  That's the reason we do Dhikr.  The body is participating in the building of the temple, and being transformed and using faculties that are not generally utilized, awakening them. That's awakening the God within.  

A practical application of this is if we're talking to a person who was absolutely caught up in the usual way of thinking in the world.  We don't want to be standoffish, sanctimonious and judgemental. How do we do it?  Play the game, like we play a game with children, but keep our attunement.  See what kind of mode of thinking is at play in that pursuit of worldly interest.  There's a kind of mode, a certain mode of thinking.  

I'll try to say this a little more explicitly.  A few years ago I was making a visit to a rishi in the Himalayas, in a cave. We were in a group of people, because it was a very dangerous jungle with a lot of wild animals. One of the members of the group asked the rishi something that I considered to be a stupid question. The rishi was in his state of ecstasy and I could see him trying to come down into the mind of that person, to try to understand how one could possibly think the way that person was thinking.  That illustrates exactly what we need to do if we want to maintain the attunement of the sacred.  

While we're talking to people we can see the motivation behind what they are saying.  We say to ourselves, "Well if that's what you're pursuing, okay, get on with it." If we're pursuing the sacred, however, and we find that same motivation in ourselves, then we've got to do something about it.
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We need to eschew becoming judgemental, and we must remember that the way out of the vicious circle is not by the pursuit of freedom, although that might be the first conclusion we come to. Certainly freedom plays a role,  but the way out of the circle in which we are caught is love - caring for others.  

Disparaging greed is still negative, even disparaging it in ourselves. We cannot overcome those elements that we attribute to the world in ourselves by wanting to free ourselves from them. It doesn't work. They come back in some way.  By really caring for people, we can then make the necessary adjustments in ourselves.  

We're trying to get down to the real issues in our lives.  We need to look into our situations, and I'm sure these are all kinds of issues that we have encountered at sometime on our path.  Instead of saying, "Well, right, love is the way out of the circle," we need to ask ourselves what are our motivations in our relationships with people.  

Are we trying to get something from them or are we giving them something?  Are we simply in the middle, or are we creating a gulf between them? Are we seeing their real being behind the surface by mirroring it in ourselves so they will discover themselves in us, through us? Will they, therefore, be able to go through the same process that we are going through in our quest for the sacred, because it's difficult for people to admit these things to themselves.  

If we could probe the depth of the deepest feelings of people, the need for the sacred is absolutely overwhelming.  It's just that it doesn't seem realistic.  People don't know how to do it.  That's what we're trying to explore, how to do it. Dhikr is the practice which gives us some kind of a support system, not quite like going to church, or sitting on a prayer carpet, or circumambulating a temple. Still, I call it the support system.  It does affect us very deeply.  

I remember listening to high mass, Gregorian of course in those days, in Montserrat, in a monastery in Spain.  And the whole atmosphere was so sacred that I couldn't help feeling uplifted. Or being with a Murshid in Hyderabad who had many people  come to say the Dhikr with him.  That atmosphere was uplifting. That's what I call the support system.  

Now, we are called upon to do without the support system, because the support systems at our disposal have become less and less effective. We need to create the sense of the sacred out of our own being and not rely upon outward support. It's a matter of really being conscious of that all the time in the course of everyday life.  It's much easier to do it in our meditation room, but in everyday life we're being challenged.  The spiritual challenge of our time is more exacting, than anything in the past.  It will give us the ultimate sense of the meaningfulness of our life. 
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The purpose of life is fulfilled in rising to the greatest heights and in living to the deepest depths of life; in widening one's horizon, in penetrating life in all its spheres; in losing oneself, and in finding oneself in the end. In the accomplishment of the purpose of life the purpose of creation is fulfilled. Therefore in thus fulfillment it is not that man attained, but that God Himself has fulfilled His purpose. 
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Tassawwuri - Tawwajeh

All the great saints and sages, the great ones who have liberated humanity, have been as innocent as children and at the same time wiser, much more so, than the worldly-wise. And what makes it so? What gives them this balance? It is repose with passiveness. When they stand before God, they stand with their heart as an empty cup;  when they stand before God to learn, they unlearn all things that the world has taught them; when they stand before God, their ego, their self, their life, is no more before them. They do not think of  themselves in that moment with any desire to be fulfilled, with any motive to be accomplished, with any expression of their own; but as empty cups, that God may fill their being, that they may lose the false self.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The crucial stage of  retreat involves hoisting ourselves beyond the commonplace attunement, or point of view. We might feel a bit like we are being drawn into an unfamiliar land, which is very tiring.  It would really be much easier to be sitting in a cave in the Himalayas just doing it and being silent - just being in the presence of the rishis, being transformed by their beings, not needing to say a word.  How inadequate not only words are, but all the skills that we are using. Still sometimes it will just happen like that unexpectedly,  so I am trying to highlight devices, called skills, something I know will help, because it has helped me.
  
There is of course the traditional guru worship.  I spent much of my youth on what I call the guru hunt.  Not only in the Himalayas, but in Christian monasteries, amongst the Buddhists and amongst the Sufis of course. There were always several criteria.  The first test was honesty.  Most didn't pass the test, in my estimation.  The second was whether he or she - mostly he of course - was trying to exercise a kind of power over me, and derived some kind of satisfaction from having that power.  Then I would say goodbye.   I tried to see whether they were just very skilled in the art of sophistication, or were just good at the rope trick, and could get lots of people coming who were flummoxed by their marvelous trickery.  There were those who climbed upon their popularity, and the reason people came was because the people were there, and there were more people coming, and they thought there must be something there because so many people were coming. Of course some thought they were real VIPs, and had a kind of contempt for anybody else.  Then, there were those who put you in it, and I knew that  from these effects, and because I felt as though I were walking on air after talking to them. I felt uplifted by their being.
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It is true that the attunement of a person will shift our consciousness in a way that we cannot do by trying to do it ourselves. Ultimately we have the ability to represent to ourselves an ideal goal. We can say that ultimately God is our guru, or the universe is our guru, but these are only words. To make the next step we try to represent to ourselves an ideal being.  It could be man or woman.   It doesn't have to be a guru or a projection or role model.  No, but it must be a being who inspires and uplifts us, and also opens up new perspectives in our understanding without the sophistication of mental constructs.  It will be a being who overwhelmingly has this wonderful heart quality, that we feel really cares. Those are the great ones. They are never talking about themselves, they are always trying to see how they can help us. We start with the face, and demeanor, and all the details of a person, a real person.  It doesn't have to be what one calls a spiritual person, or an official, or VIP in a particular special order,  just a being.  It is a fictitous being - not any person who we know - who embodies our ideal. Remember, our ideal is not something fixed, it is like a horizon, it is always beyond what we can conceive. 

There is an intermediary step which makes it easier, and that is to concentrate on one of the great prophets or saints or masters who have been described to us in the chronicles of history: Abraham, or Jesus, or Shiva, Buddha, or Zoroaster; also saints like St. John of the Cross or some very saintly beings in all religions,  Rafael  or Rabia amongst the Sufis, and masters who have passed. I would rather think of somebody who is not alive at present, because it is only after time that we begin to hear about their faults.  History tells us.  That is why the Catholic church is very careful about not making people saints until many years pass by. 

There are some very wonderful masters, of course; it is up to you to choose. First image a being whose description has been  passed down through history, maybe distorted to some extent in some way, but still behind that distortion we can feel the being, of Buddha for example. We can have a very clear sense of the being of Christ, or the Virgin Mary.  There is an Egyptian queen called Hatchepset who is a wonderful master. Zoroaster. We can concentrate on one, two, three, maybe five beings, each one being very different, and just try to see how that concentration affects us, what the thought of that master does to our attunement. When I say master, I don't mean just men, it could be women of course.   These beings are purely fictitious because their description has been distorted by the passage of time and by the way they have been transmitted.  Also we think of them as in the past, reflecting a certain civilization. The civilization in which Buddha lived was very different from that of Abraham. 
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It is difficult, but there is a way of overcoming that particular projection of a certain time in history to represent them as beyond the particular civilization in which they lived, and even as how they would be today.  I think Shiva would be teaching people how to cure their bodies by mastery, and I think Buddah would be the most eminent psychotherapist of our time.  I think Abraham and Mohammed would form a coalition to try to show the unity of all religions.  They would be the High Commissioners of the Congress of  Religions.  Christ would probably be in a concentration camp. 

We are talking now about the essence of those beings, instead of their historical circumstances.  We can get into the essence of the being of Christ - the church calls it the cosmic Christ instead of the historical Jesus - not the events of his life, and irrespective of any kind of picture.  Buddha the Tataghata, instead of Siddhartha Guatama. Krishna represents the Olympic overcoming of the frailties of the human condition. Mohammed represents the Divine power.  The Virgin Mary is our soul in its purity, and the purification of our being, so that the essence of our being is the immaculate state that gives us access to our celestial counterpart. Abraham is the Divine sovereignty, the orderliness in the chaos, the power that keeps religion from misuse.  We enter into the quintessence of each those beings.   

We can image a master, as I say it can be a man or a woman. We don't have to try to categorize them as a prophet or a saint or a master but simply a being who represents our very ideal.  In fact it is really a projection of our higher self. In the next stage we project upon what we imagine to be God the most excellent qualities of which we can conceive, and imagine them in their perfection: perfect mastery,  perfect peace,  perfect joy,  perfect love, perfect harmony,  perfect beauty.   Infinity represents the capacity of always representing a larger number than the largest number we have conceived of so far. We have the capacity of always imagining a greater perfection than the most wonderful actualization of a quality that we value. In order to be able to project these excellent qualities in a being who is not really a tangible being, but sort of a model, we have to awaken those qualities in ourselves. 
...by calling on the Name of God, in the form of prayer, or in Zikr, or in any other form, what the mystic does is to awaken the spirit of the real ego in order that it may manifest. It is just like a spring which rises out of the rock and which, as soon as the water has gained power and strength, breaks even through stone and becomes a stream. So it is with the Divine spark in man. Through concentration, through medi-tation, it breaks out and manifests; and where it manifests it washes away the stains of the false ego and turns into a greater and greater stream, which in turn becomes the source of comfort, consolation, healing, and happiness for all who come into contact with that spirit.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
That's a great secret.  We are arousing and awakening in ourselves potential latent qualities by projecting them upon a fictitious being, our representation of what we understand by God.  
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We can't project them unless we are really glorifying them. By so doing, we are consequently reborn recurrently through our glorification.  This is a central tenet of Islam, God created by our glorification,  by our prayers.   As it is expressed further, God created as us through our presence, because we are thus created, or we are thus creating as us.  This leads us to a metaphysical paradox. (a paradigm rather than paradox.)  God as a virtuality becomes a reality as ourselves. This is Sufism and is very challenging, it reverses all the old ideas of God up there as a supreme being, and all of us down here as miserable worms.  God is being awakened, not in us, but as us.  

That understanding leads us towards some of the more advanced forms of meditation articulated by Ib'n Arabi, first knowing ourselves through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through us.  That means we can't really know ourselves, but if we could imagine how we appear at the antipodal point of view to our own, then we can see that this knowledge is a discovery,  God discovering Him/Herself through us.  The second proposition, which is a little different from the first, is God discovering Him/Herself through our discovering him in us.  This is the thought that governs the state that we encounter in the Dhikr after having turned our head toward the solar plexus, when the head arises.  As we say Illa,  we are reaching into the void, and then 'llah is the rebirthing. The first A is not pronounced. In Arabic grammar, if there are two a's, one after the other, we don't pronounce the second. However, there is a different meaning in it, because the first A that we don't say aloud represents our discovery of the celestial level of our being.  We are  so awed that we are overwhelmed by it, that we cannot say it aloud.  It is just in our breath,  because really what it amounts to is that we are discovering God in ourselves at the celestial level.
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Unveiling Our Celestial Counterpart

No sooner do we become conscious of our true being and break the fetters of the false ego, than we enter into a sphere where our soul begins to realize a much greater expansion of its own being. It finds great inspiration and power, and the knowledge, happiness and peace which are latent in the spirit.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I am thinking of a description of an experience in the meditation of Shahabuddin Suhrawardi. It corroborates things that are said by the Magi of the Zoroastrians.  He says,  "I find myself in the most wonderful world that I could ever imagine, a kind of paradise.  Somehow I suspect that it is populated by beings, but I am not quite yet capable of grasping these beings, just  like a baby at first is not able at first to have any sense of what is happening on the planet. Then there seems to be a being who is walking towards me as I am walking towards him and I am overwhelmed by the splendor of this being.  As I advance I can't believe it, because I see a resemblance between myself and this being.  I can't believe it." Eventually there is what we call a coincidence and he realizes this is his heavenly counterpart. It is like the story of Jacob fighting the Angel and refusing to fight because he doesn't accept it, because it is his real self.  This is an expression of our nostalgia to discover our real selves.   Popularly, rather simplistically, we say "I want to know who I am," but have no idea when we say that of who we are.  If we knew who we are, we would be shattered and overwhelmed - shattered in our emotions and all of our representations of ourselves, and of the world and of meaningfulness -  simply shattered, like the deepest night of St. John, and at the same time overwhelmed beyond belief.  

It is false modesty, that we call humility, that stands in our way.  It is too good to believe, too good to be true, because we can't reconcile it with the defilement of our being due to the spillover of the Earth plane.  It is the only way this encounter can take place for us. Our consciousness has been lifted by projecting upon a being the most excellent qualities in our being, and discovering that in fact what we were projecting was really in ourselves at the celestial level. This is the breakthrough in the Dhikr, and in a sense we can see that it is basically the experience of the Muslim prayer. We are prostrating our head on the floor and then rising. 
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The Buddhists, especially the Tibetan Buddhists do that totally, their hands stretched out in front of them, and the body participates in the experience of a total annihilation of the false notion we make of ourselves.  It is our glorification that brings us to rise, that lifts us up, so the body participates in that uplift by rising. It is not our physical determination to rise that makes us  rise but our upliftment through the ecstasy of discovering our ideal represented not only as excellent qualities in the perfection of a being, but in the ultimate being, which we understand as God.  We know, maybe we have some sense of the being beyond the qualities.  Just as we were uplifted by the masters, but that was a step. Now we  are uplifted by the being of God, which is not tangible.  It is a kind of phantasmagoria that emerges, like a  rainbow.  The rainbow is not tangible; in a sense it is an illusion, the way we see a certain condition of the atmosphere.  God is appearing beyond our understanding. That is what the Sufis call the Divine manifestation. For the Sufis the whole universe is Divine manifestation.  
Self-denying is to deny this little personality that creeps into everything, to efface this false ego which prompts one to feel one's little power in this thing or that thing; to deny the idea of one's own being, the being which one knows to be oneself, and to affirm God in 	that place; to deny self and affirm God. That is the perfect humility. When a person shows politeness by saying, 'I am only a humble little creature,' perhaps he is hiding in his words. It is his vanity, and 	therefore that humility is of no use. When one completely denies oneself, there are no words to speak. What can one say? Praise and blame become the same to one; there is nothing to be said. And how is this to be attained? It is to be attained, not only by prayer or by worship or by believing in God; it is to be attained by forgetting oneself in God. The belief in God is the first step. By the belief in God is attained the losing oneself in God. If one is able to do it, one has attained a power which is beyond human comprehension. 
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we are doing the Dhikr we are trying to reach beyond our concept of qualities in order to imagine perfection. The Sufis call it the treasury and they say there is nothing on Earth that does not have its correspondence in the Divine treasury. That is the correspondence between the archetype and the exemplar, and the angels constitute a ladder between the existential world and the treasury.  They are the steps to our discovery of our celestial counterpart.  We will hoist our consciousness into the manifestation of the Divine qualities and their perfection. We have to realize that these  qualities are not God; they predicate the being of God, but they are still devices.  For example, in the film ET we cried and laughed because we were watching ourselves upon the screen.  Those shadows were devices.  Through which Spielberg was communicating his vision. ET was very revealing; in it we saw ET through the eyes of that lovely child. These are devices by which Spielberg was able to communicate his thinking.  We could think of the world as made of devices by which God is communicating His/Her intention.  That is what is meant by ayat, which is means a sign, a signal device, like the pugmarks of a bear in the snow. We haven't seen the bear. The physical world is made up of signs; this is Sufism. 
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Samadhi is not just departing, turning away, tearing us away from the existential state; it is peeling off one device after the other.  Certain devices,  the qualities in our being, are devices in which  the archetypal qualities are revealed to us. That's the way God reveals Him/Herself to us, by qualities in our own being.  This is Sufism. There is a famous hadith which says, God speaking, "I was a hidden treasure and I desired to be known."  "I was a secret treasure and desired to be known and therefore I created the universe as a means of knowing myself."  It wasn't  in order to know Him/Herself that God created the universe; it was out of love for us that S/He descended from the solitude of unknowing.  There are clues, indications of this in Jelaluddin Rumi.  It was for the sake of the flower that God cultivated the garden. It is for the sake of our house that the architect made the blueprint.  

In samadhi we are seeking the blueprint, and forgetting that the purpose of the blueprint is the house.  To awaken in life, we need first to awaken beyond life.  That is why we are making the  steps to samadhi, and that is why in the Dhikr we go through these steps - because while the second A of Allah represents the Divine qualities, the H represents the reality which is predicated by those qualities, their unity beyond multiplicity. It is true that while we are aware of the imperative to fulfill our lives' purposes, we are in quest of reality.   We have that feeling of suffocating. We feel life is a hoax unless we see what's behind it.  

Bistami,  a dervish who lived in the mountains for 40 years, said, "God fools you in the markets of this world.  Now when you see his effigies, they are just devices. The reality is hidden behind them." He goes on to converse with God and say, "The bridegroom doesn't have to suffice himself with the veil of the bride."  All these devices are veils upon reality; we need to peel one veil after the other. The last words Pir-o-Murshid spoke before he died were, "When the unreality of life strikes my heart, its reality is revealed to me." At  the ultimate moment, we discover  to what extent we have allowed ourselves to be fooled.  When  we see that we are being fooled, we awaken.  Pir-o-Murshid described that. He says it is just like being awake while people are sleeping, and they have no idea we are awake. Then you can see they are all caught in their trips. He says the things people fret about to us seem worthless, and the things that people don't seem to value are of  the greatest value to us.  We see how situations  affect us and are affected by us, and now we have reached a point when we see that's the way they are. That's the way it is in life. If we pursue samadhi, we could find ourselves in a trance state, and I don't want us to do that. Buddha criticized the rishis of his time and said they were going into a state of trance which they thought was awakening, but was just a trance; they were seeking these  powers called siddhis. 
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After the soul has been caught by the physical body, there comes a time when the soul awakens. As long as it is asleep it is in a kind of dream in the physical body. That is the condition of the average man: a kind of dream. The mystic is the one who is awakened. The amusing thing is that the average man will call the mystic a dreamer, whereas in reality it is he himself who is dreaming! During this dream the soul knows nothing except what appears before it, for instance desires, habits, wishes, experiences, environment, actions, thoughts, and impressions. All these are like a dream which a soul dreams. One person will perhaps dream all his life; there is another who will wake at an early age or in his youth; but there are souls, as in the case of Jesus Christ, who from childhood begin to manifest their awakened condition. Therefore it does not depend upon a certain age; even an infant may be awakened. And it may be that a person will live all his life in a dream and may leave this world in the same dream; yet though there is a subconscious awakening when something begins to say, 'You are dreaming; there is something else for you to know!' often one does not listen to it.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Sufis call Divine power the greatest power.  Pir-o-Murshid calls it the Divine sacrament. We create a holy attunement, and that's where the Divine power comes through. That's the way of the dervish. Murshid goes on to say  that those who are strong enough to take this wine would be exalted and those who cannot will be subjected to the division of the world. It's a very powerful wine. That's why  dervishes are often considered to be crazy.  People can't understand their madness is the ultimate wisdom.   

In the Dhikr there are two L's between the two A's.  In Arabic  L is the arc of a circle and A is a vertical line. This is very significant because the vertical line represents the axis God/human, and the circle represents the wheel, the samsaric wheel,  and also the  emotional galaxies somewhere in our consciousness.  In the Dhikr, the L represents the transition between one state and another, and that transition operates through a change of perspective and a change in our mode of thinking.  The L's represent modes of thinking that our soul finds difficult to reach. This is the transition between consciousness and intelligence.  Pir-o-Murshid says intelligence becomes consciousness when it encounters an object. If we empty our consciousness of its content  in samadhi,  there is no object, and consciousness  returns into its ground which is intelligence.

When we start  meditating, we still think of our self as a consciousness. We experience life outside our thoughts, our emotions, our subtle body, and so on; we are still consciousness. As we turn within we can hardly pinpoint it as a source, as a localized witness. 
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The notion of consciousness gets gradually more and more disintegrated,  and the notion of intelligence seems to take over.  That means all that we experience when we turn within is always confirming something we know intuitively. It corroborates a kind of inherent knowledge we already possess, which the Sufis call the knowledge of the soul,  and which in philosophy is called protocritic knowledge.   

Imagine that we are looking at something out there, and it reminds us of something that we know. Instead of thinking we are perceiving something out there, think that we are discovering something we know.  We have a kind of inborn knowledge, but that knowledge needs to be corroborated by experience until such a time as one realizes that "The known is a field of the knowledge." This is very profoundly what Buddha is teaching when he makes a definite cleft between the become and the non become. He says that become does not consider what was the non-become.  That's a very serious statement because it contradicts Rumi, who says, "Tonight the umpteen stars give birth to the life eternal." Buddha seems to say that existence has no contribution to reality.  Did he really mean that, or is it something his disciples said, thinking they knew what he was saying?  Is it that, in fact, we can reconcile the irreconcilibles at the creator's level of understanding?

This is metaphysics, but in our practices and meditation at this level we are moving upward from illa, upward  from one stage to another. After thinking the first A of Allah, which is the celestial level of our being, that operates in  transcendence, we cannot be the human witness, as we think we are, anymore because, as Surhuwardi says, it is our angelic counterpart that is the witness.

The significance of that is absolutely incredible.  It is the celestial counterpart in us that is the witness.  How would the world occur to us if we were an angel? Things would be very different than if we were a human being.  Since there is a level of our being which does correspond with the celestial level, we can try to grasp how that level of our being sees the world. The angel sees beauty where others don't see it,  like the story of Christ looking at the dead dog's teeth. Maybe it is deeper than that, seeing the world in the soul of people who appear  gross to our judgementalism. We see the wounded  soul, and there is beauty in it.  It is because the beauty has been abused; there is a wound. Our judging accords to an emotional measuring rod. For example, there are people whose atmosphere we feel is an insult to us, and others with whose beings we feel in resonance. That's  an emotional assessment.  We become very sensitive to vulgarity, grossness, and so on, lack of charity. This is the level the dervishes are talking about,  Nifari, for example says, "I am haunted because of my realization, and I am awaiting the moment when further perspective will be revealed to me." This is not a quiet knowledge.  We have to be in a state of readiness for this revelation to take place.  We are seeing things from the point of view of  the angel, and  seeing things from the Divine continuum.
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More Effective Meditation
Therefore, the perfection of meditation is meditation.  It is the perfected souls who continue ever in meditation, being absorbed in meditation, creating from their meditation, and living in that meditation.  The spiritual life is the drawing of sustenance through the breath from God.  It is a life of praise, yet of sobriety and balance, a life of fullness and emptiness both, being empty of self and filled with God.  This is the true purpose of initiation and spiritual training, from the moment the mureed takes bayat until the eternity of eternities, time without ending.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We can't limit meditation to turning within. The danger in turning within is that we simply get encapsulated in our thoughts and in our psyche. We find random thoughts turning up here and there without being able to control them. However much we use our will, we are fighting a losing battle.  That is not the best way to proceed when meditating.  We need to explore different ways of being able to turn within, and gain a totally different perspective to the one we gain when expanding our consciousness outward.

We are continually doing two things.  We are ingesting the environment, whether it is the physical universe or the psychological and social environment; that is, we are being enriched by it.  Also we are continually being reborn from within, and somehow there is some connection between these two extremes.

We'll examine the first one. We think of all the impressions that we are subjected to in our lives.  If we're listening to the radio or TV, or talking to people, or walking the streets and coming across the sufferings of people, especially if we're walking in the streets of India, for example.  We are subjected to all kinds of impressions, some of which become really obsessive and seem to take over, and some of the impressions could be really harmful.  We would like to protect ourselves against them, but it would be like an ostrich putting its head under the sand.  It would be not acquiescing to the reality and the drama of life.  Yet, we do need to defend ourselves, we need to protect ourselves. We have a kind of ad hoc defense system which is rather imperfect; it is not very efficient most of the time. We protect ourselves by illusions and by justifications, sometimes by not acknowledging feelings of guilt because it would be too demeaning to our self-esteem.  We produce a false and precarious bastion to protect our very vulnerable psyche. That bastion itself is very precarious, and can break down, causing a lot of unnecessary anxiety.
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We do have the faculty of filtering impressions before they reach right into our psyche. That faculty evidences our freedom.  When we extend our consciousness into the vastness, we tend to lose the sense of our personal center, the center of the totality that we are. There is a danger in that. That is why psychotherapists accuse spiritual groups of what they call the spiritual bypass, making people other-worldly.  Psychologists see the need to have a very healthy sense of the self.  That is also to be found in the teaching of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, and of the Sufi Order in general. Of course, the self is always seen in its relation to the totality.  Pir-o-Murshid calls this the false ego, and says it is really only a fraction of what we are. It is the fraction, however, with which we identify, especially when we are challenged.  Then, back-to-the-wall, we fight by affirming what we call our ego, and its inadequate way of dealing with the challenge.  If we could avail ourselves of all the bounty of our being, then we would be able to meet the challenge more effectively. Some people have 'fight or flight' mechanisms. Some run away and others just confront.  We can, however, say to the world, "I am not ready to play ball with you now.  I need to consult with my deeper self." We can place a buffer between the challenges of the world and ourselves. Meditation is our opportunity to do just that.

If we are just reacting, that is a short-circuit, we are behaving automatically. We don't need to use all of our brain to avoid being run over while crossing the road, but when we are deciding big issues in our life, it is very damaging if we just react to the challenge of life without availing ourselves of all the richness of our being.  In order to do so, we have to really know who we are, and we don't.  Most of the time we don't.  We think we do, but we don't.

The false must fall away some day; the real must always be. So it is with life: the true living being is the ego, it lives. All else that it has borrowed for its use from different planes and spheres, and in which it has become lost, all that is put away. Do we not see this with our own body? Things that do not belong there do not remain in it, in the blood, in the veins, anywhere. The body will not keep them, it will repel them. So it is in every sphere. It does not take what does not belong to it. All that is outside it keeps outside. What belongs on Earth is kept on Earth, the soul repels it. The destroying of the ego is a word; it is not destroying, it is discovering.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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The first thing is to be able to affirm our unique identity by our free will.  Our determination to ingest and digest those impressions we wish to, and reject those we don't, is a feature of our sense of identity.  We have in our psyche the same mechanism as the immune system in the physical body.  The immune system will reject an organ that doesn't have the same DNA, or doesn't match the DNA of our own body. The immune system is based upon 'me' or 'not me.'  It is that very strong sense of 'who I am' that helps us to reject those impressions we cannot cope with, and accept those impressions that will enrich our being.
 
There is a second immune system in the body, whereby the body adapts itself to extraneous elements. I think we are suffering from over adaptation in our lives.  We're suffering from a kind of psychological indigestion.  As we are invited to overly adapt ourselves to the environment, we lose the specific idiosyncrasies of our being.  Our whole civilization is calling for us to have a clearer sense of who we really are.

Our self-image does not include all the richness of our being.  We tend to identify with the role we are playing in life and with the mask we are wearing.  We are called upon in our lives to play certain roles. The guru thinks he's a guru, or a king thinks he's a king.  I don't know if a baby thinks she's a baby, but an old man thinks he's an old man, and so on and so forth.  We identify ourselves with what is really a secondary aspect of ourselves, that is not the very essence of our being.  Also, we allow ourselves to be impressed by what we see in the mirror, which is one of the most misleading of all feedback systems.  Actually, our countenance is hidden behind our face.  Some of the features of our face have been inherited from our parents, or our race. We have to live with our body the way that it is, but that is what appears at the surface.  When we turn within, we are called upon to discover what transpires behind that which appears. I know that sounds like theory, but only until we experience it.

In meditation, when we turn within, we are able to switch our consciousness, just like we press the button of an electric light.  It's the state which we could call reverie.  That's not the dream state, but it's somewhere between the dream state and day consciousness.  Then we look at life, and it's a mystery, really.  We wonder just how real it is.  How is it possible that I exist?  What does that mean?  Most of the time we go by appearance; we judge people by the way they look, or the way they talk, or the way they express themselves, and so on.  In meditation we discount the superficial in order to grasp what's behind it. The problem itself is just the way it appears at the surface. We are trying to grasp what is being enacted behind the problem.

 Usually, if we walk in the woods, we perceive the surface of the leaves on the trees, and the bark of the trees; maybe we see a bird or an insect, or even an animal.   When Saint Francis was walking in the woods, at night time, he was getting into the consciousness of the trees, and getting into the consciousness of the animals.  If we do that, we find ourselves in a transfigured world. We have the feeling that everybody is caught in a perspective, and we have been able to withdraw our vision from the commonplace perspective by offsetting the focus of our consciousness.  We have that ability. We find we've been judging the appearance and  have failed to see the issues that are being enacted behind our problems.  That's the real thing.
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How do we do this?  We downplay one perspective and highlight another.  If we have two pictures superimposed one upon the other, we can toggle our consciousness to see first one and then the other.  We can toggle between perspectives in life as well.  Normally the impact of the environment, the way the environment appears, is so strong that it seems to force us into the commonplace perspective.  How can we downplay that perspective?  

This is the clue to meditation, actually. We are talking about skills now, rather than metaphysics.  One of those skills is to consider that what we are seeing is an illusion.  In fact, it isn't an illusion, but if we think it is, then it helps us free ourselves from its impact.  That's the trick.  The world is illusion.  We have to remember that it is just a skill, to think that the world is illusory.  It is a dangerous skill, because then we start losing our sense of reality and become other-worldly, so I don't recommend it.  Perhaps it is in the physical world that reality is to be found.  Pir-o-Murshid says, "Throughout the ons of time consciousness has been awakening in matter." Consciousness, that is buried in matter, is awakening.  We can't think of our body as something other than us, that we have to discard, or despise.  

In the daytime we can't see the stars.  The light of the sun is much more impacting upon us than the light of the stars, but the light of the stars is still there.  Of course, at night we don't have the sun so we see the stars. There is a technique used by some yogis that consists in trying to see the stars longer and longer every morning after sunrise.  Eventually, we develop that ability to grasp something which is less striking than that which is more overt.
The true self need not have mind and body for its existence. It does not depend upon mind and body for its existence, for its life, just as the eyes do not depend upon the mirror to exist. They only depend upon the mirror to see their reflection. Without it the eyes will see all things, but they will never see themselves.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There's another technique, another skill, and that is what is called, in India, vairagya, which defines an ascetic.  It's a sense of detachment, indifference, independence.  It would seem to go counter to our interest in life, and our lives require us to find a blend between these two, instead of just being involved in the world, allowing ourselves to be conditioned, or leaving the world by developing a sense of independence.  That means not being dependent upon conditions, either physical or psychological, and also a kind of psychological immunity from being disturbed.  That means being able to maintain our calm under all circumstances.  This is a wonderful defense against psychological despair. We have this kind of psychological ansthesia in us, something we don't always use, but which can be useful. It is part of our defense system.  
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It is true that we become psychologically dependent upon circumstances, people, environment, and so on, and dependence will always rob us of our freedom.  If we have a strong urge for freedom and at the same time, we have a sense of responsibility, then we don't leave the world as an ascetic.  We find a way of eschewing being caught up in our thinking and in our emotions.  I'm not talking about running away from circumstances.  No, that's the way they are.  Our assessment of them, however, and our emotional dependence upon them robs us of our ability to fulfill a need that is very strong in us, and becomes stronger as we evolve, a need for freedom from conditioning, freedom from dependence.  For that we don't have to leave the circumstances, because the prison is not the circumstances. If we try to escape from the situation we find ourselves in another situation that is just as bad or even worse.  The prison is in our opinion.

We are seeking, as Buddha suggests, freedom from opinion - that includes my opinion - our freedom from any kind of dependence upon a guru to make us high, because if we really wish for the good of a person, then we want to show them how to not to be dependent, how to become self-motivated.

Random thoughts disturb us because they have an impact upon our emotions, because they are important for us, and therefore they are able to hold our attention. We can think it's all illusion, but that is not the method I suggest.  We can also say, "Yes, this thought keeps on recurring. I want to be high, but this thought keeps on recurring.  Now why is it?  Because there's something in me that it speaks to.  I attach value to what the thought represents."  It always represents a definite situation in life.  As long as that is important, then being exalted, being high, having a sense of the sacred, seems to be secondary.  As we evolve, we change our sense of values.  Then it is just that, the sacred, that is the most important.  It is so much more important than our physical or psychological needs, that it takes over.  That's why Murshid calls it a passion.  It's really paramount, almost a desperate need.  the sense that, as they say in India, "Don't you dare die before you attain illumination."  It becomes so important, that we just have to adjust our life to it
.
The further we evolve, the more we have a need for freedom, and the further we suffer from the conditioning of circumstances upon our thinking, and, worse still, upon our emotions.  Seeing problems from our personal vantage point will pull us into that vantage point.  We get caught in a prison and that prison is in the mind. 

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Roles

Man develops in himself a false idea, and that false idea is 	identification with something which he calls himself. He says, 'I am a professor, a lawyer, a barrister, a doctor,' or, 'I am a king, a lord, or something.' But whatever he claims, he is not that. His claim may be humble or proud, but in reality he is not that.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we find some freedom from our attachments, then we begin to discover our true being hidden behind the mask and behind the role, and that is a real breakthrough.  We think to ourselves, "Yes, I am playing a role. I'm a housewife, or I am a typist, or I am a nurse, or a doctor.  I'm a lawyer, or whatever."  Then we think, "Well that's not me, that's something that I developed the ability do.  I'm very good at washing up, for example, but, you know, that's a role I'm playing, even more so when I think, I'm a man, or I'm a woman, I'm an old man, or I'm a young man, or I'm an Indian, or I'm an American." The breakthrough comes when we discover the features of our countenance behind our face.  That is our real face, actually, our cosmic face, and it's incredibly beautiful.  It could be the face of a young person; all the wrinkles have gone.  It could be the face of a very mature being in the body of a young person.  We cease to identify with our face altogether, and then something clicks. All of a sudden our features are simply the way our real being becomes configured into forms. We find freedom from the self-image.

We are trying to see the stars while the sun is in the sky, trying to perceive a subliminal reality behind the appearance.  If we do that in meditation, we find we're not disturbed by random thoughts.  Now we come to a totally new facet of the same problem. As we turn within, we discover the emergence of our new being.  Instead of thinking, "This is me," - a static picture - we are continually being reborn and consequently reformed, restructured ex nilho, out of nothing.  We find we are not disturbed by random thoughts if we try to grasp our emergent being emerging from within.  That is turning within.

If we don't give support to that new dispensation in our being, it will be still-born.  That means we have to capture it as it emerges, just like the crocuses when they start breaking through the snow.  We just have to capture it, that instant when it's beginning to emerge. In order to do that we have to let go of our old self. For the fresh petals in the center of the flower to unfold, the degraded petals at the surface need to fall apart.  
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If we hang on to our personality, we can never change, and if we don't evolve, we go backwards. It's rather hard to hear, but a lot of people go back instead of forward in life. Lovely people, young people full of ideals, get disappointed and bitter. We need to turn our attention away from the impressions calling from outside - how we ingest the universe - and draw our attention to what is emerging from within. It is not really us - that is one way of looking at it, that we are emerging - but really it is the whole cosmos, the whole universe that is emerging as us,  and the beauty of this is that it is not conditioned.

The whole universe has the ability to self-organize itself in each part of itself, each fragment of itself, but as Pir-o-Murshid said, "God can entertain a greater degree of perfection in a being who participates in His creativity."  Creativity is our most wonderful gift; one we don't always use.  The ultimate work of art is ourselves, our personality, for example.  We are endowed with the faculty of being able to become what we want to become, and we don't avail ourselves of it.  

We now learn to think, "Well that's the way the world comes through as me."  To begin with, yes, but at a certain point we take over.  Remember the pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past.  How we could be is much stronger than the way we've become because of our past.  The future is more there. We create it by our imagination, in the same way that the whole universe is created by the Divine imagination.  The word imagination suggests that an emotion and a thought becomes configured as a form. Instead of trying to find out what our real face is, now we ask ourselves, "How could my face become?"

If we look at the Jewish Bible, instead of the western translation, the voice under the bushel doesn't say, "I am that I am," but says, "I am that I become."  It is our prefiguration of what we could be, in the future, that pulls us out of the conditioning of the past.  There's a saying of the Sufis, "Oh man, it is your ignorance of your freedom that is your captivity."  Our freedom is through our imagination, our power of being able to project, in a very concrete way, like a picture, the way we could be.  Meditation is a means of enhancing our creative power, but at first, imagination starts with an emotion, not a thought, an emotional attunement.  It could be an emotional process, like Brahms trying to cope with the great tragedy of his life, falling in love with the wife of Schumann.  It was an impossible situation.  Through his art he transformed that suffering into joy - that emotion manifested in a form. He couldn't sit down and write that music; he had to be stirred to the depth of his  being.  To be creative ourselves, we have to be very deeply stirred by the miracle of life coming through us.  That is ecstasy.
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We can feel that ecstasy of life burgeoning in our being, and see how we tend to stand in the way of this emergence of new dispensations of life by being attached to the way we think we are.  It really means giving it up.  That's not easy, because we think we can rely upon the way we are, we don't know what's coming through.
This state of ecstasy is not different from the natural condition of man when touched on hearing a kind word spoken, or moved to tears either on separation from the one he loves, or on the departure of his object of love, or when overjoyed on the arrival of his long-expected beloved. In the case of a Sufi the same feeling becomes sacred, his ideal being higher.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I remember studying composition with Mme. Boulanger in Paris - that was way back in 1936 - and she said, "Well, this part of your composition, I don't know, it doesn't really seem to fit into the rest.  I bet that you composed it at five-o'clock this morning."  I said, "Yes, you're right, that's the truth, I did.  I felt I had to have it ready for you."  She said, "That's the trouble, you see." I said, "Well, then what do you think I should do if I try to change this part." She said, "No, that would be a collage.  You can't do that.  It must be organically part of the whole."  "So, what do you mean?" " Well, throw it into the waste paper basket."  What?  All that work!  All that heart I put into that composition, to throw it into the waste basket?  "Yes, what will come of it will be better."  

We have to have faith to believe it will really be better.  What if it isn't?  This is like the story of Shams Tabrizi snatching the manuscript of Jelaluddin Rumi, throwing it in the well, and saying, "If you want, I can pick it out of the well.  It'll be dry."  Rumi said, "No."

To go further, we can realize that our defeat can aver itself to be a victory, and our victory can aver itself to be a defeat.  That is very heartening, because most of us feel that we have failed, and it is good to accept failure as a springboard to beat our records. Some people can use their disablement as a springboard to beat not just their own record, but to beat the record of all other people.  Churchill was a stutterer, and he became one of the most wonderful orators in history.  Dr. Hawking cannot communicate, except through a very high-tech computer, and yet he is a brilliant physicist.

Unless we are megalomaniacal, we are bound to have, not necessarily a bad self-image, but a precarious self-image. In that there is some judgementalism about ourselves.  There's some judgementalism about the world in general, and doubt, which results from a very strong sense of truthfulness.  We come to the point when our need for truthfulness is so strong that we are very suspicious both of words and the euphoria of spiritual emotion, which is not the same as exaltation.  It's euphoria; it's not the same thing.  Somehow, that sense of truthfulness is going to make us be very perspicacious, and consequently doubt all that we believed, and doubt our own validity, and have a sense of having failed.  For example, Gandhi, at the end of his life said, "I failed."  Just imagine!  And he freed India.
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It's a very stringent sense of authenticity which will not accept any compromise with either make believe or wishful thinking, and in spirituality there is a lot of wishful thinking. What we want to do is have a sense of our real being, behind the masque, because that's real, without wishful thinking.  Suddenly, this is me. 

If we are very keen on truthfulness and authenticity, then we like to have a proof, an indication.  Otherwise, we can hear all kinds of words that are enchanting, and then we go back home and  think, "Well, I don't know, it hasn't affected me.  At the time, I was under the spell of that guru, and now I go back home and I think well, what have I got in my pocket?"

I can tell you an experience that I had. Once during a retreat an old lady went into a kind of comatose state. She was really dying.  She was in delirium.   I was away, but then I came in the hall.  I saw her lying there, and saw how concerned everybody was, and thought, "This is it."  Somehow she felt my presence.  As I got close to her, she put her hand in my hand, even though she was in a state of coma, and she opened up her eyes and literally all the wrinkles left.  She became a young girl, radiant, full of light, as though totally transfigured.  That's a reality.  It's not something like wishful thinking or make believe.  There it was, right there. That was the reality of her being that was covered under the bushel.  Now we must know that we have the same in us, too.  If we do not know that, then we have a bad self-image, and we suffer despair.  I am not inviting us to imagine what is not.

We have to be very careful of fantasizing. There is a difference between imagination and fantasizing. When we are fantasizing, we are caught up in our personal identity. We are disconnected from the totality, like a battery that's been taken away from its charger. In creativity there's always a connection between the totality and the part.
The mind is not only the treasure-house of all one learns, but it is creative by nature. The mind improvises upon what it learns, and 	creates not only in imagination, but it finishes its task when the imagination becomes materialized. The heavens and the infernal regions are both the creations of the mind and are experienced in the mind.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Dr. David Bohm said that in the future creativity will only be meaningful if it is meaningful for humanity, instead of just the creating person. Our evolution is to become meaningful to humanity, instead of trying to be creative in an enclosed space within ourselves. If we do that, then it's fantasy.  It could be anything. If it's signed Picasso, it's worth thousands of dollars, but it could be anything.  Change a color and nobody would notice the difference.  That's fantasy. We couldn't change a note of Bach without a musician seeing that it's wrong.  
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We can consider the circumstances in our life as a catalyst which enlists our creativity.  That doesn't mean that we are reacting.  It just it triggers off a process of rebirthing within us.  If we simply deplore those circumstances, we haven't made anything of it, and the opportunities have been lost.  

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The Inner Dhikr

 ...the soul may be considered to be a condition of God, a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time. And the experience gained in this time, with its ever-changing joy and pain, is interesting, and the fuller the experience the wider becomes the vision of life. What one has to experience in life is its true being.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Instead of saying the Dhikr aloud, just think it. Each word is a signal for a certain state of  consciousness and attunement. As we exhale, the circle gets wider and wider, and then as we inhale the head comes down facing the solar plexus, plunging into the void. Then we continue inhaling as the head turns upwards, then concentrate on the heart center and then the chakras upwards. That is when, rising above earthly conditions, we transmute all the levels of our being. We awaken from the earthly perspective, and discover the everlastingness of our being, and eventually, in the H, we touch upon eternity. 

Awakening in life we're aware of meaningfulness and purposefulness in the middle of the ignorance and incongruance of people and situations. We see in existence the fulfillment of the Divine purpose. If we are able to maintain the awareness of unity, while we are still aware of the multiplicity, then we see that, as Pir-o-Murshid said, it is all a condition of God. Just like a wave is a condition of the sea, all is the sense of oneness behind the multiplicity.  

The head rebounds after hitting the solar plexus. Remember well that this is our nostalgia for the unattainable, but it's also our glorification that hoists our consciousness, or shifts our acumen to a very high pitch. When we hold our breath, there are no thoughts - it's eternal so it's beyond change - and  of course no sense of space, maybe just a sense of being overcome, being involved in existence. We are able to have an overview of the existential state, as though we were flying so high that we reach beyond the cosmos.

The way to do it is to shift our perspective, from earthly perspective through heavenly perspective, as Buddha says, beyond existence, and beyond consciousness and beyond existence. It's even beyond the programming. At first there is not an overview, it's just a sense of being backstage in the world of existence, of awakening from the existential perspective.
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In the second Dhikr, the head bows as we exhale. Illa exhale and 'llah inhale. In the first Dhikr we're using the samsaric wheel as a trigger that catapults our consciousness beyond the circle, but after that there is what Buddha calls an extra-samsaric inheritance, which is very similar to what the Sufis call the Divine inheritance. We don't think of ourselves as the progeny of our parents, but we are carrying in us the inheritance of something undefinable, which the Sufis call God, which is not flawed by existence, and the Sufis call that the Divinity of our being.

At a certain point we proceed with the third Dhikr, which is Allah hu. Allah, and then H holding the breath and then Hu exhaling. That is a lifting, not only hoisting ourselves beyond the human condition, but even beyond the angelic condition, beyond any condition. We can think of existence as a condition of God, as Pir-o-Murshid says, but the condition is subsidiary to the reality. At a certain point, these are things that strike a certain realization in us, and when that happens we discard the thought, we discard knowledge. There is no more thought, no more consciousness, just the awakening of intelligence. The emotion of joy is transmuted into peace. We have lost our sense of individuality. 

Now it's very short lived, we can't hold that for a long time. As the Upanishad says, the breakthrough of awakening is like a flash that passes before we realize it, and we can never hold it. That's the H of Allah, the H, as in no thoughts, no considerations. When we add the U, it becomes Hu. Now we awaken in life and we have these ponderings or soul-searchings beyond our understanding, but we can see ourselves in life, in the world, wonder who we are, and what it's all about.... know there is no way we can grasp this miracle of life. Now there is joy and pain, whereas in samadhi there is merely peace, but the joy and pain can never touch the reality, the core of our being,

The soul can be illustrated by the eyes, which can't see themselves. The soul thinks that it is the garb in which it had invested itself. For example, we are a man, or a woman, or a young man, or an old man, or we think we are a philosopher, or we think we are no good, or we think we are very smart, or we think are rich, or we think we are poor, or think we are inadequate. We think all kinds of things about ourselves, and that is because we identify with the circumstances, but they do not affect the reality of our being. Pir-o-Murshid said, a king thinks he's a king because people say "Your Majesty," and he's sitting on a throne and there is a crown on his head; or the businessman in London has a top hat so he thinks he's a businessman; or a young man who didn't know his father left him a fortune thinks he's poor. That's awakening in life, realizing that we are none of those things with which we identified. We think we are happy, or we think we are sad, we think we have failed or we think we have achieved. It's all a condition of our true being that remains unscathed by its condition. We're caught in a perspective, and to be awake we free ourselves from that perspective. 
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Beyond all the exchange of thoughts and ideas and words and even realizations, there's sharing the same bread at the same altar. The link at the soul level is the ultimate expression of love, finding affinity at the soul level. We can really find another person in ourselves. We begin to talk like that person, and think like that person. There has really been an osmosis, and that is what we mean by holy communion at the soul level. We can reach into the consciousness of Buddha, or Christ, or any being. Obviously we have physical parents and ancestors, but we also have celestial parents. We find an affinity at the celestial level, so somehow we do inherit from the whole universe. 

When we say the Divine inheritance, what do we mean? It is potentially present in each one of us, and that means it is inherited at all levels. We can think of ourselves as a wave of the sea which is not separate from the sea; there is no boundary so it is an expression of the whole sea that is now awaking in life. It is at the higher levels that commonality and affinity is discovered; at the lower levels we are very different. That's why Whitman says that in the state of samadhi we reach a sense of oneness and overcome multiplicity, we see the beehive instead of the bees.

At some point, at some level, we make contact, and what's happening to me is happening to you, and vice versa. That's why Pir-o-Murshid said, "You think the purpose of our life is to give lectures; most of my work is on the higher planes." There is no being in the entire universe that we cannot reach, at some level.

When consciousness extends beyond the boundary and the notion of individuality, the memory of the whole universe comes back, because our memory is in some way connected with our sense of identity.  Our memory of the universe is buried in the unconscious and kept hidden there because we identify with our individuality, and that identity starts at our birth. Our memory of the universe is interrupted at our birth, actually our conception. If we cease to simply think of ourselves as what one calls a discrete entity, in other words if we lose the sense of the boundaries of our being, then memory of the whole universe comes back. 
In the memory the secret of heaven and hell is to be found. As Omar Khayyam said in his Rubayat: 'Heaven is the vision of fulfilled desire, 	and hell the shadow of a soul on fire.' What is it? Where is it? It is only in the memory. Therefore memory is not a small thing. It is not something which is hidden wn the brain. It is something living, and it is something so vast that a limited mind cannot conceive it. It is something which is a world in itself.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


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The Proof of the Pudding

Spiritual attainment is not a thing to be brought before people to prove that it is real, or as a show. What is real is proof in itself, what is beyond all price or value does not need to be made much of before people. What is real is real, and the precious is precious in itself; it needs no explanation nor pleading.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

We're concerned about getting back to where we were. We can't go back by the same door. These meditations have triggered off new ways of looking at our problems. Now we need to build a bridge between our meditations and our real life situations. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The crucial test is whether there is a difference in our way of dealing with our problems.

We could take each point in turn and make a summary. When our consciousness is expanding, we are creating conditions that are favorable to getting into the consciousness of other people involved in our problem, more and more people.  Eventually we can see the problem in a very wide purview as being an aspect of the whole drama of the universe. If we think it's our problem, then it makes us feel absolutely inadequate to solve it. 

If we're in a situation with a lot of people, it may be all rather chaotic and inconsistent. Still, if we have meditated in this dimension and have a sense of immensity, that gives us a kind of power, let's say resilience. It is our limited sense of ourselves that is our weakness. The trouble is that when we are facing the challenge of situations, we tend to fall back on our ego self. When we're meditating, we are able to see better what is enacted in our problem, but when we're right there in the midst of people, then we cope inadequately, the best we can. We find ourselves backed to the wall and  of course we cleave to our last resort mechanism, which is to fight from the place of the ego. 

Pir-o-Murshid gives us an adage to remember: "The ego is only a fraction of what we are."  We are resorting to the strategies of that ego, defenses, denial, or wishful thinking. Denial may occur when a situation is so very painful - a person has died for example - that we can't accept it. It's not possible. That's a denial. It might take us a long time before we accept it. We may never accept it. That's one way the ego is able to protect itself. It's a very inadequate way, a delusion which persists until we don't need that device, and can look at reality face to face, but it takes a lot of courage. 
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It is this sense of the all-embracing dimension of our being that will help allay the inadequate strategy of simply enlisting a very small fraction of ourselves, which is not up to dealing with the problem. Meditation is an opportunity to place a buffer between our problems and ourselves. 
To know the self is the most difficult thing in the world, because what man can perceive first is a part only of the self, a limited part.  When man asks himself, "What is it in me that is I?" he finds his body and his mind, and in both he finds himself limited and apart from others.  And it is this conception of his being that makes man realize himself as an individual.  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.  When man in this illusion, says 'I' in reality it is a false claim.  Therefore everyone has a false claim of 'I' except some who have arrived at a real understanding of the truth.  This false claim is called in Sufic terms Nafs, and the annihilation of this false self is the aim of the sage.  But no doubt to annihilate this false ego is more difficult than anything else in the world, and it is this path of annihilation that is the path of the saints and the sages.  One may ask, "Why should one take the trouble to annihilate the ego?  Since life is full of pain and suffering why add to this suffering?"  The answer is that even if an operation will cause one suffering, it is better to endure it in order to be cured.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we're turning within, that's where we're dealing much more with ourselves in relationship with the situations. We have to face a lot of concerns, a lot of soul searchings, because none of us is totally satisfied with ourselves. I don't know anybody who thinks s/he doesn't have to improve because s/he is absolutely perfect. We're dealing with a lot of painful things, especially guilt. We try to deceive ourselves by not admitting guilt to ourselves, let alone to other people, because it diminishes our self-esteem. Yet somehow we know we are guilty, so there is some inconsistency, and there is some real dishonesty in our mind, denial. 

Admitting guilt to others will help us to admit it to ourselves, whatever the consequences. One of the greatest graces is to be supported in our guilt by people who love us and who will support us if we acknowledge our guilt, and cannot support us if we don't because that would be dishonest. That's real friendship. We have made a pledge and really decided we are not going to repeat that which was the cause of our guilt. 
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The other thing is resentment. In the old days I used to ask people to forgive, because of that's message of Christ. Then somebody stood up and said,"Pir Vilayat, I feel  terrible because of the abuse that I have suffered. Now I feel even worse because I can't forgive that person, and you make me feel bad that I can't forgive that person." That was the last time I asked people to forgive.  I realize however, we can only try it ourselves and see the fantastic freedom it gives us, not to condone - it's not the same - but let us say not to bear a grudge against a person who has done us harm.  It's terribly difficult when somebody has done harm to another person, a person we love. I think of the man who beat my sister to death in the concentration camp. Well of course it's very difficult for me to love him, and to forgive him, but I can see that he was on a trip. He was brainwashed by the Nazis and he had a lot of grudge in him. Perhaps he had a father who beat him. There are all those psychological reasons. The woman who betrayed her for 100,000 francs, however, I find unforgivable. So maybe there is a limit to the extent to which we can forgive people for doing things to other people. I find it easier to forgive people who have done bad things to me. Christ had the answer of course: " They know not what they do". 

There are complicated situations, where there is some guilt mixed up with our resentment. We do not like having accepted abuse, so there is some kind of inconsistency there in the unconscious. The unconscious is not very reasonable, or very logical. In that case, we can't forgive the abuser until we are able to come to terms with our own guilt, and our guilt is not founded, not grounded, so it's a hoax. That's very complicated. I'm always full of admiration for the way psychotherapists are able to proceed painstakingly over a period of months and years to try to bring to light the way that people think, which is the cause of the trouble. 

Turning within has a very great contribution to make to our sense of inadequacy. That's the third thing; after guilt and resentment, there is inadequacy. It's all related because if we feel we have bad self-image,  we don't feel  big enough to forgive. It has to do with our own self-esteem. Sometimes a big dog is safer with children than a little dog. A little dog might bite. A big dog would be more lenient with abuse the poor dog is subjected to. He is strong, he can take it. 

First of all we realize we're wearing a masque and playing a role. What we thought we were is not at all what we are. That's a first step. A second step is, instead of saying, "Well I want to know who I am,"  we say, "Our real being is emerging." "I am emerging," instead of, "This is me." Dynamic instead of static. The beauty of this is that it carries hope, because we can change. We can improve. Then we see the impact of the person upon the situation outside. At first it's not clear. 
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Sometimes we simply think we are the victim of situations outside that are totally fortuitous. We call it destiny, and it's very complicated.  Jung said, "If you don't meet your shadow, it will appear to you in the form of your fate." When I heard that the first time, I was absolutely shattered, and stymied,  and overwhelmed. It took me a long time to accept, although I'm sure I had intuited that connection - that the same is true at the level of the psyche as at the physical level. If a wave emerges in the Atlantic, the whole Pacific has to adjust itself to that little wave in the Atlantic.  That's a law of physics. It's also true at the level of the psyche. Indeed there must be some relationship between how we are dealing with our shadow and the situations in which we find ourselves. It's not always, in a one-to-one situation. We can't always say, "You caused that situation." It's more complicated.  There is an invisible causal link, or maybe it's more like a concatinative, rather than a causal, link. That's what Jung means by synchronicity. There are several factors instead of just a one-to-one causal link. 
Why are there in the world so many people who believe that something is wrong with them, and so very few who think that all is well? Even among ten thousand people there is hardly one who will say, 'All is well with me.' It is very easy to blame destiny and to call it 	misfortune or ill luck, but it cannot be remedied by calling it by these 	names; on the contrary, it grows with the years. Besides the more the 	mechanism gains hold of a person's life, the more that part which is called the engineer is suppressed; it never gets a chance. A person with only a little will, with only a few desires and wishes, is pushed downward by the force of this automatic working in life. He calls this automatic working 'conditions' or 'circumstances.'  He may see some reason for it, and he may find an answer when he looks at it from a logical point of view, but it is never wholly satisfactory. It does not give the fullest satisfaction because there remains the feeling that underneath there is some other solution and some other meaning in every problem.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we've turned within, we begin to become aware of the emergence of our real self, and the kind of hope that it opens up. Then we look at our problems, and try to see if indeed there was a link between the way we were, and the way our problem is. If we can see that, then we can see that if we have changed, there is going to be a change in the situation. There is a balance between the degree to which we adapt ourselves to the environment, and the degree to which we adapt the environment to our own sense of purpose. The more evolved we are, the more we transform the environment to fit our purpose. When I say "more evolved," I think I should be more specific. A person on an ego trip will try to adapt the environment to his or her sense of purpose. That does not mean s/he's an evolved person. 
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As we evolve, we're able to transform the situation and the people around us by helping them to fulfill their purpose. Our purpose is to enlist the purpose of other people. That is really the secret of leadership. We know these people wish for something. They have an ideal, and we share that ideal, but they can't make it. We can organize them in such a way that we help them to make it. That's leadership. At least that's spiritual leadership. 

We can get into the consciousness of people much better from within than if we are simply expanding our consciousness from without. It happens even if we don't try.  It's a kind of faculty we develop by training ourselves to turn within. We experience much more that osmosis, that people live in each other, particularly people we love. The psyche of those people with whom we are most in resonance has become an element of our own psyche. It's not like they're there and we're here; there is a real osmosis between us. Also we can get into the consciousness of people and sometimes we are not aware of it. Sometimes I feel like somebody is calling me desperately, a kind of SOS. I wish I were more able to know precisely what it is and who it is. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. That's a kind of faculty of becoming very sensitive to the conditions of other people. 

The next, more advanced stage, is that we really carry the psyches of other people in our own heart. There is a word used by the Hindus, "One becomes like an oyster that has a grain of sand in it, and transforms that gritty bit of sand into a pearl." The pearl doesn't hurt you quite as much, because it's rounded. The presence of another person in our psyche can be very painful. A selfish person might say, "Well, I don't want anything to do with that person. I don't like him/her and I don't want anything to do with him/her." That's easy, but the spiritual path is a path of selflessness and of altruism. If we presume to be on the spiritual path, then we need to follow that precept. It's not just to be tolerant of people. Really it means to carry them in our heart. That is particularly difficult if they are obnoxious, let alone have hurt us, in addition to being obnoxious. As Pir-o-Murshid says, "We are tested in our love." To love somebody we dislike, well, that's what it's all about. As we turn within, that is what we do. 

The danger is that we just withdraw within ourselves, and place buffers,  sentinels, at the doors of perception. The whole idea of the sentinel is that it acts as a kind of a filter so that we have a selection. We can have psychological indigestion if we just take in everything, so we have to protect ourselves at first. Gradually we become stronger, and we're able to take more and more. 

First of all, that selection is a feature of our freedom. If we just expand our consciousness, then we've lost our individuality, and then we lose our sense of freedom. The second feature is transmuting the impressions from the outside instead of ingesting them or simply rejecting them. By transmuting them we can ingest them. That's what the body does with food. The body does reject some food, and some food is simply transmuted. That's how we can learn to cope better with people. 
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It also means we are able to see the gist of the problem - instead of the way it appears at the surface - the events or circumstances, what is enacted by the problem. This gives us a deeper insight. The state when we turn within is exactly what Dr. David Bohm calls the implicate state; everything is intermeshed with everything else. We can see our relationship with our problems much better from the inside than we can in the usual way we think of ourselves and our problems, as their own separate things. Now we see a connection between them. We see them not just in their context, but in connection with ourselves. 

We find that turning within is like a funnel upside down. The totality of the universe is funneled into the void in the solar plexus, and then emerges and fans out. Obviously by having to converge, much of the wealth of the universe has to be sacrificed, just the way much of the richness of three-dimensional reality is sacrificed in a two dimensional photograph. That is why it is not good enough just to turn within. People think that is what meditation is about. We have to turn upwards. That is include all levels of our being. That's where we are working in the Dhikr. 
It is not easy for the true self to dismiss mind and body, when a person cannot dismiss in life his thoughts of depression, sorrow and disappointment. The impressions of happiness and of sorrows in the past one holds in one's own heart: prejudice and hatred, love and 	devotion, everything that has gone deep in oneself. If that is the case, even death cannot take them away. If the ego holds its prison around 	itself, it takes this prison with it, and there is only one way of being 	delivered from it, and that is through self-knowledge.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


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Judgement and Revelation

It is the realization of the soul which gives one the conviction of immortality.  There are two stages that the Sufi has to go through.  The one stage is Yaqin; the next stage is Iman.  Yaqin is the stage in which one perfectly believes, without the slightest doubt, "My soul is immortal." Iman is the stage when one is convinced by one's own realization, when one is the witness of one's own immortality.  What are we to attain by meditation?  Is it power that we attain?  Is it inspiration that we wish to attain?  No, it is the vision of our true being that we desire the most, it is to see our innermost self face to face.  
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The witness is a celestial counterpart of our being. It's a kind of sthetic sense - what physicists call elegance - a sense of beauty. We are judging a situation not with the mind, but sensing the beauty or the ugliness in the way the situation is being handled. Our policy would be to handle an ugly situation beautifully. We can't account for the way other people handle it, but as long as we handle it beautifully, that's all we can do. It's the same kind sense that a conductor has in a choir or an orchestra, a sense that, "Well, you could do it better. Yes, if you sustained that note, that would give a totally different coloration to the whole piece of work."  There are several recordings of Allegri's Miserere. They are very good of course, but one is just superb. That's because the sensitivity of the conductor and the singer is fantastic. That's the angel in you, the judgement of the angel. After the crucifixion of Christ, I think it was al-Ghazzali who said, "When there is a stupid judge in the court, then there is a victim on the cross." It has a lot of implications doesn't it? Let's say that our ordinary judgement is the stupid judge. 

It is that fine sensitivity that gives us our sense of the values that are enacted in a situation. We have to not just be uplifted by looking into the eyes of babies; we have to be something of a baby ourselves.  We have to become ingenuous, absolutely with no guile, no manipulation, no strategies. It's  honoring the purity of the soul, really honoring the spiritual status of people. By so doing, we are helping them to have self-esteem. Of course we can only do it if we have a sense of spiritual pride. It's pride in the Divinity of our being. Be careful of humility; false humility can be a distorted pride. In fact we could pride ourselves on our humility. Be very careful.
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The key note here is to find a way of being high. It's sensitivity that helps us to be high. We feel the attunement of people, and see there is a kind of spillover. We could easily let ourselves slip into that kind of attunement which is sometimes really rather vulgar, slovenly, like the kind of world we are living in at present, decadent. We tend to vie with the Joneses. It's can become a constant reminder of being high. I remember sitting in an ice cream parlor in California with my two little boys. Of course they wanted an ice cream, so they took dad to the ice cream parlor. I thought to myself, "I am high." I could see the attunement of people around me and I thought, "Gosh, if only they knew what they're missing. They are looking for ice cream, but just think, this is the ice cream of the soul". 

That's something we need to remember in our daily lives. We can see how people are trying to pull us down into their attunement. They think we're uppish, sanctimonious or standoffish. We have to play the game while we're still being high, without being presumptuous in any way of course, just like we play with our children. We're not quite at the level of what they enjoy, but you enjoy it because they enjoy it. 

There are further levels we have encountered in the practice of the Dhikr beyond the celestial sphere - knowledge that is manifested instead of that which is acquired. That is what is ordinarily called intuition. Sometimes we can't figure it out with our mind, but sometimes all of a sudden something becomes clear to us, and we didn't do anything. It's totally impromptu, unexpected. We really have the feeling, "This was revealed to me," because we haven't done anything to acquire it. That's what is meant by Jabarut.  There is an adage behind it. Newton said, "I think as God thinks." Scientists in those days were shocked by what he was saying. What he meant was if  a physicist, for example, can have any sense of the programing of the Universe, it's because his/her mind thinks like the universe thinks, less well - like the fraction of a hologram behaves less well than the whole hologram, but it still behaves like the hologram. 

When I first met David Bohm, he was at one of our conferences.  Afterwards we spoke, and I said, "Well of course you know your theory of the implicate and explicate state is exactly what I teach and that's what we find amongst the Sufis. So I'm very glad that you've said it so explicitly. It helps us to have a model, like scientists also need models. But there is another dimension that I don't see in the implicate/explicate state. I call it transcendental levels." He said, "It's to be found in the holomovement." I said, "No, I don't think so. It's something else." Then he came out with his book called Unfurling Meaning, where he spoke about these levels. That's where a great physicist became a philosopher; he speaks about levels of meaning. When we look at our problems we can see there are levels of meaning in our problems. We think we grasp what is enacted in the problem; then we see there is another level in which it looks different.  It's always a matter of reconciling the irreconcilables. 
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The way Eastern meditation has been imported in the West, and misinterpreted, has led towards people being otherworldly. That's why I'm emphasizing the way meditation can help us deal better with our problems instead of just discarding our problems in order to get into a state of samadhi. 
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 concept is false, it is a false identity. If the hand is broken off, or a finger is separ-ated from this body, we do not call the separate part 'I,' but as long as it is connected with the body we call it so. This shows that all that the false ego imagines to be its own self is not really its self.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We are finding freedom within an involvement, not from circumstances, but from our personal opinion and from our personal emotions, and our notion of ourselves, and so on. Finding freedom will give us an insight we can't have if we have a personal bias. That insight gives us a sense of the priority of our values. Then we are much clearer about what we are doing in life. We  ask ourselves, "Why am I doing it? What are the values I am pursuing? I pay lip service to those high values, but when it comes to action, do I find that I am pursuing totally different values? There is some kind of inconsistency there." We see the values much more clearly when we have extricated ourselves from our involvement and are able to look at them with a certain amount of objectivity. That is the teaching of Buddha. It is objectivity instead of subjectivity. Watching the body without thinking, "This is my body." "Why do I think this is my body? It's a product of the fashioning of the whole planet, of the universe in fact. I have to live with it as it is." If we look at it objectively and don't identify with it, it gives us a certain amount of freedom. We may even think,"Isn't that extraordinary, I'm able to schlep this body about and yet it's not me. Well is it me, or not? It's a product of the fabric of the planet. Isn't it extraordinary that I have some power over the fabric of the planet, to move it about, even transform it by my realization? I can smile for example. Those atoms of the Earth are transformed into my emotion of mirth, so that I can smile. It's amazing." 

Then we look at our mind. "I used to think my thoughts were original, but Buddha is pointing out to me that they are conditions." Yes, to a large extent we are almost totally conditioned. That's Krishnamurti's teaching. I asked him an impertinent question once: "I just wonder whether you were conditioned to free yourself from conditioning." He didn't like that question, whether that wasn't the ultimate condition.  I don't go all the way along with Buddha, because we do have some original ideas too. We're not all just totally conditioned, but it's good to realize to what extent we are conditioned. 
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Of course, we look at our personality. That's again something we inherited from our parents. We have parents, and maybe we have angelic parents too, maybe parents at all levels. Maybe we inherit from all of them. When Murshid says Divine inheritance, he is not thinking of God up there with a big beard, and us down here, miserable worms. He is thinking that we inherit from the whole universe at all levels. It's true that, when we say Divine, there is a sense of priority given to the sublime, that which has not been tainted by the existential condition, like fruit  before it starts becoming rotten; even when it's rotten it's still fruit. 

That is an extraordinary experience, when we look at our personality and think,"Well it's not me. It's something that has grown. Maybe I've inherited it from my ancestors." We can even earmark exactly a quality that was to be found in our father or in our mother. We can then notice, "There is something in me that I can't account for by my inheritance from my parents." We are able to overcome our identification with our personality. The real breakthrough though, is watching our consciousness operating and thinking, "Why do I think it's my consciousness? Why do I think that I am my consciousness? Consciousness is like a flame. It depends upon  there being a log the flame can burn. If there is no log there is no flame, so I am not my consciousness." This realization is a breakthrough in Buddhism. Of course Buddha doesn't say, "I identify with cosmic consciousness and my consciousness is just the focalization or the lens through which I see, or through which the universe sees." He doesn't say that because he never uses a word on the strength of a presumption that there is such a thing as cosmic consciousness. It's assumed, but he doesn't say it. Sufis say it: cosmic consciousness, Divine consciousness and so on. That's why Buddhism is hard to follow because there is never any act of faith in it. It is purely practical, but if we read behind the lines we see it differently. 

Meditation is wonderful. It enables us to look at things with a certain distance, a certain perspective. Then we have to continue our day. The trouble is that we tend to slip back to where we were before. There was a time when I followed a policy of meditating for five minutes, on the hour, throughout the day, all the time. We can't always do that, of course.  If we're in our office. the boss comes in and says, "Well you're supposed to be typing this letter. What are you doing?" We mustn't lie. To say,"I have a headache," would be a lie. We could say, "Well I'm practicing yoga. And it makes me more efficient so in the end I'll type better."
Initiation is the beginning and perfection is the end, the making complete,  But where is the beginning and where is the end?  They are both in silence, in God.  In the silence we were born, and to it we return.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


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Bringing Glorification into Life
The nature of beauty is that it is unconscious of the value of its being. It is the idealization of the lover which makes beauty precious, and it is the attention of the lover which produces indifference in the beautiful, a realization of being superior, and the idea, 'I am even more 	wonderful than I am thought to be'. When the vanity of an Earthly beauty is thus satisfied by admiration, how much more should the 	vanity of the beauty of the heavens be satisfied by His glorification, who is the real beauty and alone deserves all praise. It is the absence of realization on man's part that makes him forget His beauty in all and recognize each beauty separately, liking one and disliking another. To the sight of the seer, from the least fraction of beauty to the absolute beauty of nature, all becomes as one single immanence of the divine Beloved.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When we are doing our practices, there is no point in just speaking words.  That will not do it for us; that's why people don't do it, because it won't work.  We have to make a bridge between what's happening to us as we sit, repeating a wazifa, and our situations out there.  We could do it after repeating our wazifa.  That's the instant in which we make a pledge, and that would make all the difference in our life.  To bring about change in our life, we have to open a new chapter, a departure from the previous one. It's a quantum leap, not a slow transit.  It is our pledge that opens the new chapter.  That's what the Sufis call Maqam, which means a station. Our pledge opens a door to the next step being revealed.  We have to do something; we can't just wait for it to be revealed; we have to make a pledge.  A pledge is a departure from the past, like saying, "I won't do this any more."  It's a definite departure.  The way for this to be real is to imagine a situation in which that particular wazifa makes a difference.  

There are very simple cases. For example, imagine a situation where we are doing the wazifa Ya Wali. What's the point in saying "mastery, mastery, mastery?" It's got to be real, it's got to have consequences in terms of our life.  So we think "What is the situation where I am not exercising mastery? Oh, I'm still smoking cigarettes, that's where it is, right there. Apart from the fact that the surgeon general says it is bad for me, it's the fact that I think I can't do without it, which is a sense of limitation, of helplessness, which is the opposite of mastery."  
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There are many situations in which we don't feel up to taking control, and we become a victim;  so there's no point in repeating wazifa unless, after repeating it, we imagine the situation in our life in which it applies.  Take ya Haqq, for example. We may be a truthful person, but still there's one thing that we have denied, and the reason for that is because we are afraid if we say it, our whole world will collapse. We might lose our job, our relationship, or whatever.  It goes deeper than that. The ego produces a strategy to validate itself, a very fragile self-confidence which is based upon make-believe, a kind of a display,  like an owl opening up its feathers when it's threatened, to appear larger than it is, and creating illusion.  The trouble is if we believe in it, that is self-deception, but that's our self-image, so our self-image is then threatened by our truthfulness.
One must rise above one's likes and dislikes, for they cause much 	weakness in life. When one says, "I cannot stand this, I cannot eat this, I cannot drink this, I cannot bear this, I cannot tolerate, I cannot endure" - all those things show man's weakness. The greater the will-	power the more man is able to stand all that comes along. It does not 	mean that one has no choice; one can have one's choice, but when one gives in to one's choice then life becomes difficult. There is a false ego in man, called nafs by the Sufis, and this ego feeds on weakness. This ego feels vain when one says, "I cannot bear it, I do not like it, I do not look at it." All this feeds the ego and its vanity. It then thinks, "I am better than others," and thereby this ego becomes strong, and so man's weakness becomes strong. But the one who has discrimination, distinction, choice, while at the same time having these all under his control, the one who enjoys sweet but can drink a bowl of something bitter, that person has reached mastery.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
I remember a case where a man kept on looking at me with such disdain that I thought, "Good God, what have I done? I must be a horrible person. That person really dislikes me tremendously."  I didn't like it. It required some courage to open up and say it to him, but I did, and he was totally transformed by it.  He said, "Well now I really appreciate you because I see that you are absolutely upfront."  Change altogether.  Sometimes we are afraid of being upfront, of opening up doors of communication, and that can make all the difference.  That's a pledge, not to just say, "Haqq, Haqq, Haqq," but there we are, in a situation where we are really applying it.  That means earmarking a typical situation in our life when we are not applying this quality nearly as much as we could and make a resolve. That's why we make a pledge: "I will do this or that."  If we are very perspicacious, and very frank with ourselves, very honest with ourselves, we keep on earmarking guilt. We become very scrupulous about any damage we have created in another person. We don't like to; we deny it because we have denied it up to that point, because it is demeaning to our self-esteem.  
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There's a wazifa which means 'to honor' or 'to be honorable' and it is the prospect of being honorable that represents a kind of emotion that's not just thought.  That helps us pull ourselves out of a guilt situation, because the joy of being honorable is much greater than whatever pleasure we could get from that situation.  That wazifa is Mu'izz. Wherever we can we try to portray the wazifa in a form, in a scene or scenario. The scenario I select for this is Christ riding out on a donkey from the Garden of Gethsemane, down the hill and down to what used to be the Temple of Solomon.  The donkey says, "It's true, I have a raucus voice, and I have rather unseemly ears, but I did have my moment of glory. There were palms under my feet, and hallelujas around me."  That's the message of Christ; the poor in spirit participate in the glory of heavens.  When we reverse our guilt our soul is lifted, a kind of emotion in which we feel that we have a free ticket to heaven. It's being honored.

There is a saying, in the Qu'ran that means literally 'the God created by your prayers.'  It's a very amazing statement.  How can we understand this?  All the wazaif are based upon this principle, our quest of glorification. This is a very deep instinct, our need for glorification, our need for the sacred. It's really like a superlative of bewonderment, like being full of wonder for the marvel of life. We ascribe it to God; we imagine God up there, which is  nive,  but a very workable way of perceiving.  In order to be able to glorify, we project upon this representation that we make of God - which is not God but it is a representation we make - our own qualities, by imagining how they would be in their perfect state.  The exemplar reveals something of the nature of the archetype, so we are arousing dormant qualities in ourselves by our glorification, so glorification is the ultimate creative act.  That is prayer. After saying "and to thee do we give willing surrender," and prostrating on our knees with our head on the floor, then we can rise again. That's a very great moment, because then the body participates in the raising of our spirit, as Pir-o-Murshid calls it.  We are ascribing to God those wazaif, and when doing so we are awakening those qualities in ourselves.  

There's a practice I used to do during my retreats when I was younger, I would bow, and then as I'd rise, I would be thinking of many wazaif, and projecting them into a sort of idyllic representation that I made of God, knowing very well that's not God but at least a stepping stone. 
We are building the palace for the king, wherein the king must live and that his name be known to the world.  It is not for us to live in, nor is it for the glorification of our names. 
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Ya Ali  means "most high." The word seems to resonate with raising our consciousness into the highest spheres. It is our act of glorification that raises our consciousness. We can't reach into the higher planes just by wanting to.  Ya Ali is the catch word, it really represents that passage into a condition beyond our understanding.  The Sufis have a way of giving us landmarks.   Ibn' Arabi says the Sufis like to look upon all the qualities as archetypal treasures in the Divine treasury, and that treasury is what is in the world of the hidden treasure that wishes to be known.  It's the archetypes of what we experience as exemplars. An archetype is rosehood instead of roses, or roundness instead of round objects.  We have the faculty of imagining something always more perfect that what we have imagined so far, so glorification is an act which has the effect of lifting our consciousness above the existential world - because that's where the exemplars are - into the world of archetypes, Lahut.  

Ibn' Arabi says that the angels built a ladder between the Earth and the treasury. That's a beautiful thought, the ladder of Jacob upon which we climb.  That's the Sepherotic tree, that's the ladder.  We label the different levels and when we meditate on it we can hoist ourselves from one level to the other.

It occurred to me that I've been avoiding the 'bad' wazaif, like instead of the honorer, the dis-honorer, Muzill instead of Mu'izz.  It's typical of not wanting to acknowledge our shadow, denial of our shadow. I couldn't understand why there were such 'horrible' names amongst those sublime ones.  I see that it is very realistic because we has to acknowledge our shadows. I have never prescribed them myself but somebody once asked me what they were. We can find them in our books.  I won't take responsibility for saying what they are, but when we think of an act for which we would say to ourselves "Bad boy, or bad girl!" well then the wazifa would be Muzill. We think, "Yes, but I would rather be honored than continue doing that makes me condemn myself." That's why we have that antinomy between the wazifa and the shadow.

There are dimensions in glorification.  One is a kind of cosmic emotion which we could translate by the word magnificat, and the wazifa for it is ya Azim.  To say it is to express the emotion of the miracle of life, how wonderful, ya Azim, ya Azim, ya Azim....  There was a case of a mureed who was disenchanted with life, and with himself, passing through a kind of dark night, and his guide, gave him the wazifa ya Azim. That turned him off, because he couldn't be enchanted - we can't force ourselves to be enchanted -  and consequently he practically dropped out of the Sufi Order.  He didn't quite, he stayed with it, but still we have to be careful we are not forcing ourselves just to repeat a wazifa.  I see that all the time, people repeating wazifas almost as a punishment, "I'm supposed to repeat the wazifa because Pir Vilayat said to. I've got to repeat it 100 times and I'm afraid that he might curse me if I don't do it."  We can't force ourselves, and that's why the wazifa must be documented by something tangible.  We just look at a flower. Instead of saying, "I've got to be enchanted,' think "how beautiful this flower is." 
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  It's not the archetype, we're seeing, it's right there in the exemplar.  The same is true if we have the courage to unravel all the levels that cover our real being.  Being enchanted with our real being  is what we could call reenchantment.  We can't be enchanted with our personal self unless we are a megalomaniac. We can only do it if we discover what we imagine to be God coming through us.  That's Ya Azim. 

The combination of ya Azim, ya Ali is a very wonderful combination.  We start with euphoria, Azim, and that leads us into exaltation. Being mindful of raising our consciousness beyond the Earth plane is the only way in which we can bring into the Earth plane something of the glory of the heavens.   Pir-o-Murshid goes to an extreme when he says when we awaken it is as though those things that mattered so much don't matter anymore, or those things that perturb people don't perturb us in the least.  He says those things we are sure about prove to be exactly the opposite of what we think.  Then he says those things that seem to have value now seem to have no value whatsoever.  Like Buddha at the palace, when I visited the palace of the Maharaja of Baroda, which so many people admire, I thought, "what a token of selfishness and greed, worthless unless it gave work for people." 

There's a saying of Shams Tabrizi, who describes what he calls the man of God. "The man of God is a palace in a ruin."  If we compare, for example, the palace of Cyrus in Iran, which I visited, and is a total ruin, but beautiful as a ruin, with the palace of Monte Carlo, then we see what I mean by what has value and what is worthless. The way to raise our consciousness above the Earth is to access the values that we come across differently from the way we've done it so far, giving a priority to those things which are of the greatest value. In comparison the others seem, relatively at least, worthless.  We can't pull our consciousness up into the higher spheres just by wanting to; it doesn't work that way.  Dropping the ballast that keeps us prisoner on the Earth plane enables our soul to rise.  That's why Murshid says, "Indifference and independence are the two wings that enable the soul to fly."  We are attached to things and depend upon things, and there's nothing wrong with it, if we really do fulfill our purpose of life.  However, if we can fulfill that purpose, and yet maintain our freedom by not being attached, that's the only way in which we can raise our consciousness into that sublime attunement of exaltation or ecstacy.  In America we call it being 'high,'  Maybe we could say when we are awake it's not just that we are more aware than most people, but we are high amongst people who are low key.  The wazifa Ya Ali represents exactly that, raising of consciousness into the higher spheres by our ecstasy.

 I was thinking of the Sufi symbol; the heart is a circle of which the top and the bottom has been subjected to the gravity pull of the Earth, and the wings are the redeeming uplift which balances that gravity pull.  That which balances that gravity pull is detachment and independence.  Pir-o-Murshid says we are tested in life by the degree to which we are free.  There's a wonderful combination of ya Ali and ya Wahid; in India one says Vehedo instead of Wahid. Vehedo represents detachment; he calls it 'the solitude of the oneness.'  
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If we raise our consciousness we are very alone, unless we balance our indifference with love. That's what Al Hallaj did.  Vehedo is  typical of the quest for samadhi in Yoga. ya Wahid, and ya Ali are very typical of the kind of music that is played in Christian celebrations, uplifting and angelic. ya Azim is typical of the dervishes, because the dervish is a palace in a ruin, it's like the ultimate value of our being that can never be defiled. It's the immaculate state, or the voice of Caruso. That's the palace in a ruin, the triumph of the ultimate values over the powers of destruction.  

We have a very wonderful combination of ya Majid, ya Mawjud. Majid represents the sublime, and Mawjud the reality of everyday life which is flawed by distortion due to egos of people.  Combination of the two, ya Majid, ya Maujud,  is very important, because we have difficulty in reconciling what Pir-o-Murshid calls our Divine inheritance - the aristocracy of the soul - and our own inadequacies, which he calls the democracy of the ego. It's very difficult to reconcile these two.  If we can go about in life being aware of our Divine inheritance, and accepting that it had to undergo defilement, and yet, that perfection is still present within that defilement, that is the palace in a ruin.

When man-the most egoistic being in creation, who keeps himself veiled from God, the Perfect Self within, by the veil of his imperfect self, which has formed his presumed ego-by the extreme humility when he stands before God and bows and bends and prostrates himself before His Almighty Being, makes the highest point of his presumed being, the head, touch the Earth where his feet are, he in time washes off the black stains of his false ego, and the light of perfection gradually manifests. He stands then first face to face with his God, the idealized Deity, and when the ego is absolutely crushed, then God remains within and without, in both planes, and none exists save He.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


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Introduction to the Practices

"To explain God is to dethrone God." To say that God is abstract is like saying: 'God is space, God is time.' Can you love space? Can you love time? There is nothing there to love. A beautiful flower would attract you more than space. And nice music will attract you more than time. Therefore the believer in the abstract God has only his belief, but he is not benefited by it. He may just as well believe in no God as in an abstract God. Yet he is not wrong. He is uselessly right.
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan said, "One develops the ability to raise one's consciousness to the higher spheres at the command of one's will." It's something we train ourselves to do. We can't expect to do it right away, but keeping on, doing it over and over again, we develop the ability to raise our consciousness above earthly conditions, above our earthly identity, and above our personal vantage point. We need to examine many different attitudes  towards our selves, towards our self-image, towards our real self, and towards the situations around us, our relationships with people, and dealing with our problems. In everyday life we have to keep the lines of communication open between earthly conditions and ourselves, but for the purpose of attuning ourselves, we need to make a definite break, a definite hiatus between the earthly perspective and the Divine perspective. 

There is no way of doing it through our personal will. It's a matter of attunement just as as a violinist or 'cellist or harpsichordist will attune him/herself to a certain pitch. That's a word Pir-o-Murshid uses: pitch. 

We can't do it out of our own will; therefore we need some kind of a support system, and one way is thinking of a role model. In our Sufi perspective, our teachers are the prophets, saints, and masters of all religions. There is a hierarchy in the transmission. We have our personal teacher, but there is a hierarchy which reaches into very high levels of attunement.

There are three steps. The first is representing to ourselves a prophet, master, or saint, such as they have been described in the chronicles of history. The next step is getting into the consciousness of being, really shifting our consciousness and transferring our consciousness into that being; so we imagine what it's like to be that being. The third step is representing to ourselves an anonymous teacher of our own making who really is a kind of projection of how we would imagine our ideal teacher to be.  This leads in an infinite regress towards what Pir-o-Murshid calls 'God consciousness,' which is at the limit of our outreach. 
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The image of the teacher is a support system.  It could be a master, saint, or prophet of a great world religion. It's a support system, but any dependence upon that support system would stand in the way of really allowing the impact of their being to lift our consciousness.  That is why at some point we need to destroy the idol. We find that in every religion, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam. The crucifixion of Christ was, of course, the destruction of the idol.

The idol is replaced by tasawwuri. Tasawwuri means the picture. We imagine a picture of a teacher.  In the ashrams we have the picture of the guru on the table, and a candle, and so on.  We never do that in the Sufi Order, and I ask you not to do so, because Pir-o-Murshid would be very offended by our observing that kind of idolatry. It's true that a picture is a stepping stone, but we have to reach beyond that stepping stone.  The only way to do it is to reverse our consciousness and try to imagine what it would be like to be that teacher.  There is no way we could ever do it, but we try.  As a consequence we are lifted into the attunement; by the miracle of resonance we are lifted into the attunement of the master or prophet or saint.  In India, most of the rishis whom I have met were munis, they didn't speak.  The effect of these beings on me was much stronger than those with whom I was able to converse.  In  our classes, attunement is our highest priority. 

The skill is to earmark a prophet or master or saint of one's choice. When  doing the practice, it is better to select, for example, three masters, saints, or prophets. We are working for the message of unity of our time. It would be advisable to choose a master, saint or prophet from different religions.  In addition to that, we have the hierarchy, some of the Rajahs or Pir-o-Murshids of the various Sufi orders, then to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. That's how the transmission comes down to us. 

Now we ascribe qualities to these teachers.  What happens is that by thinking of a being a kind of mirroring effect takes place.  We are able to discover potentialities latent in our being that are displayed in the being - in the prophet master or saint - we are concentrating upon.  Consequently it has the effect of awakening, or arousing those latent qualities.  There is no way we can develop qualities, or even enhance qualities, simply by our will, or even by our concentration, which we often do in repeating a wazifa. That's not the way it happens. The only way it can happen is by the leverage of the consciousness that we gain through the prophet, master or saint.



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The Consciousness of the Prophets

We do not need to speak to people about being virtuous, kind, righteous, for our own righteousness is enough to make them so; our goodness is sufficient to make our surroundings good. People are forever seeking psychic power and control when all the time it is within themselves. Our self is the greatest enemy we have. The horse wants to go where its rider does not; it is the self that will not listen to us and does not act according to our wish. It is not what another person says, or a priest says, or a Church says; the great teacher is both within and without. If we are willing to be guided, everything can teach us a lesson. If we wish to see the advantage of sobriety, we shall see it among sober people; if we wish to see the disadvantages of lack of sobriety, we shall see them among people who are not sober; if we wish to see the advantage of guidance, we shall see it among those who are guided. It is all a matter of experience and study; and our own guide towards our true ideal will never fail to guide us aright.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It's important to take sufficiently into account our concerns about being present in everyday life, and assuming our responsibilities. There is a kind of  detachment which seems to be contempt for the world, and is the opposite of involvement and love, unconditional love. 

In my estimation, it's helpful to awaken in life having first awakened beyond life, in other words reach samadhi first before awakening in life. There is no doubt that Pir-o-Murshid's teaching is awakening in life.  It's not the way of the ascetic.  The beauty in our perspective is that we embrace all the masters and saints and prophets, so we have a tremendous pool of resources to inspire us on our path. 

Realization is a function of our emotional attunement.  We cannot think we can reach realization by wanting it, by seeking it, that we can actually acquire it, and put it into our pocket. It doesn't work that way.  In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, we find that after having cleared the misassessments of the mind games, and the mixed up emotions we get entangled in, having overcome our assumption that the physical world is the only reality, then we are on the way to samadhi.  The step that opens up the doors to samadhi is a state of attunement, and a very high attunement. I don't think there is any other way. 
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Heart is that factor of our being, of our thinking, which feels within itself a longing to express love; it is an awakening of love and to a feeling of love. This is the factor which produces thought; this is the factor which produces feeling; in this lies the creative power. All the power which one can possibly wish to attain throughout life is reached by this means.
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We will ascribe qualities to the prophets that we are going to call into our minds and hearts and souls. There is something arbitrary about that choice, but it will help us to focus.  We're going to use a language different  from  our conventional language, the language of the wazaif,  because we are able to attach a significance to these words which we do not attach to the words in our conventional language.

 Shiva 

I suggest starting with the representation of Shiva.  Traditionally he is represented by sitting in a very high climate in the vastness, on a tiger skin with a cobra around his neck and a trident in his hands.  He typifies our propensity to develop mastery over outer conditions, the furtive mind, disturbing thoughts, and random consciousness, including personal emotion - pain, or horror, or dismay, or joy, or euphoria, or ecstasy.  The rishis harden their bodies by putting up with the most stressful conditions imaginable: extreme heat, or extreme cold without protection, hunger, fasting, extreme tiredness, keeping awake through the night, controlling their heart beat and all bodily and mental functions. The joy, the euphoria that it gives is beyond description. When we have to discipline ourselves, to give up something that we very much want for the sake of our ideal, a kind of euphoric condition overtakes us and carries us into high dimensions, unlike the results of permissiveness and slovenliness and randomness. 

The wazifa for that is ya Wali.  We could add ya Qadr. Wali means mastery and Qadr means the release of Divine power. We thought we were  in control of things, but eventually we realize that we are giving vent to a dimension of our being that is super-personal, and could therefore be ascribed to Divine power. 

I want to point out that every quality has it's shadow.  It's because of our fear of slipping into the shadow that we have difficulty in developing the quality. The shadow of mastery is ruthlessness, despotism. We find this in people who are in their self-image, isolated from the totality of their being, which is coextensive with the universe, and therefore, with what we mean by God.  As long as we maintain that connection, then we are exercising Divine power, and not despotic personal will, which is called being on a power trip.
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Shiva has given an example of vairagya. Do not think it an asceticism. Very often people say, 'Vairagya means asceticism.' But it is not so. Asceticism is a crude interpretation of vairagya. The word vairagya comes from tyaga; in Sanskrit tyaga means renouncing. And when it is said 'vairagya,' it means success in renouncing. Shiva showed it in his life. For years he did meditations; he stood for hours and for days on his head; for hours and for days he held his breath in; he went without food for days and months. All those things that one can do in order to master matter and life he did. 
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

 Having represented to ourselves the traditional representation of Shiva, let us try and get into the consciousness of a being who has conquered his/her tendencies by putting up with the most incredible discomfort, and stress, and loneliness. Try to imagine what it is like to have segregated ourselves from the world to the extent of living alone in a cave in a high mountain, having not seen another human being for ten or twelve years. If we can get into the consciousness of such a being, we discover a propensity which is hidden within, but which we never exercise. It will help us to awaken to that faculty and contribute towards the enrichment of our personality, but it is not our purpose to develop our personality. Our purpose is to fulfill the purpose of our lives, which is beyond our personal purpose, and which Pir-o-Murshid calls the Divine purpose. 

If we shunt our consciousness into the consciousness of that being, and try to experience how he/she feels, then we realize that s/he has a feeling of having overcome personal conditions. His/her consciousness is raised beyond the existential perspective, and has an emotional detachment from worldly conditions.  Consequently s/he is able to have an overview of the physical world, existential conditions and even heavenly conditions. Imagine that we could fly, and not just beyond the the planet, but beyond the solar system and beyond the galaxy and beyond and beyond the existential universe. Now that is an imperfect simile. It has nothing to do with space. It has to do with dimensions of reality. The important thing is the pitch of consciousness, like reaching to the harmonics of sound and pitching higher and higher.

 Buddha 

Let us get attuned to the being of Buddha. We all entertain some kind of a picture of Buddha. It could be Buddha sitting cross legged. It could be walking amongst his disciples with dress similar to the monks around him, so we could only recognize the difference by the incredible radiance of his being, and the tremendous peace that surrounds him, and the light of his eyes, and his deep concern for beings in their suffering. He followed a very similar path. His formation was that of a sanyassin, so he showed contempt for the world. 
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He looked upon it as conditions which deter us from our highest aspiration. He discarded his wealth and position, considered them of absolutely no value, to such an extent that the only thing that was meaningful to him was a state of freedom from conditioning leading to awakening from the personal perspective, attaining illumination.  Here is a radical break from the kind of compromise in which we find ourselves in our lives, having to give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. The wazaif would be ya Wahid, and eventually ya Samad.

He practiced absolute one pointedness, going through the most painful asceticism and renunciation, to the extent that he crawled on all fours to get to the water, covered with vermin and weakened to the point he was like a skeleton. He found that those kind of hardships did not make for illumination, but they certainly marked his determination to make a break from the commonplace way of life. He made retreats in a cave. It was only later on that he sat under the Bodhi tree for a period that may have been forty days, without eating, or sleeping.  In those days of course the place was infested with wild animals and venomous snakes and insects, and there were storms.  Here he sat keeping to his vow undeterred, unrelentingly. He not only gave the doctrine, but he showed the steps leading to illumination.
Buddha was asked one day by his disciples what he meant by ignorance. And he answered by describing how a person was once clinging in distress to the branch of a tree in the utter darkness of the night, not knowing whether there was earth or a ditch or water beneath him. All night long he trembled and wept and was clinging fast to that branch. And with the break of day he found he was not one foot away from the earth beneath his feet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The breakthrough is when consciousness is carried beyond the limits of the personal self. Consciousness has been carried beyond the personal vantage point, and has become cosmic. If we shift our consciousness into the consciousness of Buddha, first of all he is protecting himself from the environment by surrounding himself with a zone of silence, like sitting in a temple.  The temple is not made of walls, but made of his own sense of boundary between the sacred and the profane.  It is detachment that constitutes that boundary, and the consequence is a sense of great serenity, peace untrammeled by the disturbance of what we call now the rat race of the world. Those are the conditions that favor the expansion of consciousness beyond the limits of what we think of as ourselves.  Pir-o-Murshid said that  higher consciousness is reached by finding conditions that are favorable to being peaceful and silent and aloof.  It is difficult, extremely challenging, to find these conditions in the middle of the world.  It is more realistic to find that attunement in silence.  Silence not just of the body, but silence of the mind, silence of the emotions, and even the silence of consciousness.
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Under favorable conditions, not just physical environmental conditions, but the attunement as well, energy can flow out from inside, but can't flow inside from outside.  Imagine sitting there, as I've done myself, under the Bodhi tree throughout the night, meditating and trying to get into the consciousness of Buddha. We have sense of a tremendous expanse, starting with space, but eventually an expansion of consciousness, a sense of immensity.  We realize how poor our normal purview is when we identify with our personal self. Thanks to these conditions, consciousness is able to rise, to shift it's pitch from one level to another. There is no way to describe them in our ordinary language. Buddha makes an attempt when he says, "Beyond existence, beyond non-existence, beyond consciousness, beyond non-consciousness, beyond consciousness and unconsciousness."
Among Buddhists, whose religion is full of reason and logic, who believe in things they can see and understand, there is a custom of sitting for their concentration before the feet of Buddha.  It is not necessarily idolatry, if one thought about it deeply; it is getting into that state of repose in which the idol of stone is.  And there is interest, for it is the idol of Buddha, their Teacher, who by that method attained his peace.
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now we try to get into his consciousness and see how we can monitor our consciousness into perceiving the physical world, that's the condition of most people. We mask that perspective - not with our will - but only by detachment, vairagya, which means indifference.  Consciousness he said is  like a a flame; it needs a log of wood. If there is no log of wood, there is no more flame. Consciousness depends upon its object. Bereft of support,  consciousness peters out into what Pir-o-Murshid calls intelligence, and what Buddha calls "beyond consciousness. beyond existence and non-existence." It's difficult enough to imagine what 'beyond existence' means, but there is a still further level. 

These are guidelines that are only meaningful to those who have reached that point where they act as a beacon in the wilderness.   These ideas sometimes act as a trigger that may suddenly unleash a flash of realization that can't be captured and consolidated, it passes before we are aware of it.  If we try to recapture it we are distorting it and simplifying it.  We can just experience, to feel that sense of freedom. It's not mastery as in yoga. It's a very clear sense of the way in which we allow ourselves to be conditioned, and giving vent to our need for freedom, which represents a very deep longing, and goes counter to our involvement in life.  In Sufism we try to introduce freedom in involvement. In this case we need to first find freedom, and then see how it can work in our involvement.  It's not freedom from what we think we want.  That is our personal identity.  In fact it is ultimately freedom from our personal identity, which is conditioning. 
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We are getting into the consciousness of Buddha at that point when he said, "I have overcome conditioning," or he calls it, "the freedom of determinism."  If we have a taste of Buddha's attunement, it will awaken our need for freedom, which is apparently withheld by commitments in life - our responsibility.  Buddha shows the way of the ascetic and the steps leading to freedom.

 Zoroaster 

Zoroaster has said, "Look at the sun when you pray, at the moon when you pray, at the fire when you pray." People therefore call them sun-worshipers, fire-worshipers, when all the time this worship was merely a way of directing man's attention to all the witnesses of God which express His nature. The one who cannot see any trace of God anywhere, can see Him by looking at all these beautiful things, and observing the harmonious working of all these things.
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The transmission describes Zoroaster as a magus - the singular of magi - a kingly luminous being who reflects the whole Mazdean tradition that came before Zoroastrianism, and which always dissolves the veil between the earthly plane and the celestial planes, which are described as planes of light. The wazaif we use are ya Nur and ya Quddus.

Zoroastrianism, Mazdaism particularly, is a path of light, which is a real criterion in our commitment - light is what we are seeking - which overcomes darkness, and ambiguity, and manipulation, all those, and greed, all those things that lurk in the dark.  That is due to, instead of living a flattened universe confined to this reality that we call the existential world, our always being aware of the beingness of what we call matter.  Water is not just H2O that we pour out of the faucet in our kitchen, or bathe in in a river. It's the body of a being: Ardvisura Anahita.  We are privileged to be able to participate in the gift of her being, providing that we respect her instead of polluting her like we've been doing.  She's even prepared to recycle herself, but we are overstretching that good will.  It's a whole different way of looking at life, asking permission of Ardvisura to bathe in the river or in the bathtub - permission to pollute her purity. Of course her purity remains unscathed within its environment. 

The Earth is the body, or the crystallization of the archangel Zamiat, which we are manhandling and abusing and polluting.  We also show   respect for the sanctity of animals, and the spiritual status of all beings, instead of judging things by our assessment of their personality.  We enter into resonance with the real being hidden behind that appearance, that formation, which is personality. 
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If one asks the Sufi, 'Which ideal do you hold?' he says, 'One Teacher; the only one who has always been there, who claimed to be Alpha and Omega, the first and the last. All these different names which the world holds in esteem are the names of one personality.' Whatever name it is, the Sufi feels exaltation; he sees one sacred personality behind all those names.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We are proceeding to get into the attunement of one teacher, and then another, one prophet or master or saint. It could be a woman of course. It doesn't have to be a man. So far it's been men.

 Abraham  

A being who plays a very important part, especially in the religious thinking of the West, is Abraham.  Let's try to portray him according to the descriptions that have come across the chronicles of history.  We imagine him to be a giant of a man, a fatherly or grandfatherly figure, a towering personality who is so imperative in his authority that we inevitably feel, "This is what I need to follow in my life." We have this picture of authority coming from above in a kind of hierarchical grading, because he is speaking in the name of God, or he claims to speak in the name of God. 

Wandering in the desert is a very different experience from living in urban areas. For one thing the silence is overwhelming, and the loneliness.  We feel in contact with an invisible reality we do not even try to see because it's so present that it speaks for itself.  We hear the sound of the wind. It may be just a flutter, but it can also be violent, and it seems to be speaking to us. When we realize, as we do now, that everything is related, this sound is saying something which has a cosmic significance.  Of course we interpret it.  In that special condition we find in the desert, we feel our interpretation is not simply our personal vantage point. There is something cosmic in it.  I suppose it is similar to what Buddha experienced, that sense of immensity. The message seems to be for our whole community, or for humanity, rather than a personal message.  It's the opposite of samadhi. It comes out of a very great sense of responsibility for our community, for our fellow beings - a sense of God as a reality incorporated in humanity, instead of contempt for the world, and detachment, and cloistering ourselves away - so it has a very social import.

The most remarkable thing one notices in Abraham is that, besides being a Prophet and a mystic, he lived the life of an ordinary human being, one with his fellow men in their times of pleasure and sorrow.
						Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Abraham is very much the prototype of the prophet.  We find the same thing in Moses and most of the prophets of Israel, but we notice that they simply felt like the mouthpiece of the Divine guidance.  They never claimed to speak out of their own authority, but always as an ambassador of the one and only Being.  There is a very great sense of the oneness of God overriding the multiplicity, which we find later on in La illaha illa 'llah, the oneness.  There is no claim of being an incarnation of God.  That's an Avatar as you find in Hinduism. You don't find it in Buddhism.  This whole way of thinking and feeling and realizing has its influence in the personality of the teacher, in this case the prophet.
Abraham, the father of religions, who taught the ideal of the formless God, which was explained gradually by different prophets who came after him.
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
People need guidance, and will only follow the guidance of someone who really impersonates the authority which is derived from the Divine authority.  The wazifa for that is Qahr, the Divine authority.  We see what happens when that authority is discarded.  People want to have their personal freedom, but freedom can lead to chaos, disruption, and a lot of suffering for selfish aims.  It is authority which curbs the selfishness of people, which is always at the expense of other people, a principle of orderliness.  That's the whole personality of Abraham.  It typifies the orderliness that comes from authority. 

The same applies to Moses who then is dynamic instead of static. He is a pioneer.  He opens the door for his people to a totally different environment from the one in which they were imprisoned in Egypt.  He is somewhat of the same nature as Abraham, except that he is moving forward whereas Abraham is stationary.  Not totally stationary, because in those days of course the people were shepherds, nomads.  They didn't live in houses; they lived in tents. 

It is important to see the relationship between Abraham and Melchizedek. The authority of Abraham is secular in comparison with the authority of Melchizedek, which represents the church, religion.  He was a high priest. No doubt he sacrificed at the altar in Jerusalem, which is probably the stone now housed in the Dome of the Rock, where the sacrifices took place.  I believe he lived in that cave at the top of the Mount of Olives in which I made a retreat once, whereas most people were living in tents. We picture the being of Melchizedek as being very holy, a very high priest. His whole personality becomes sacred, totally dedicated to the sacred attunement. 

His authority is very different from that of Abraham, and as a matter of fact, has prescellence.  Prescellence is the superlative of excellence, and so predominates.  Consequently he is the one who crowns Abraham as king, and anoints him.  That is a ceremony in which there is a sacrament of bread and wine, which is then found in the Catholic Mass.  The religious attunement is brought down to the masses through a sacred ceremony in which they participate. 
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A sacrifice of sheep on the altar becomes kosher.  That's an aspect of a whole picture. It's a little painful. There is some blood, some horror in the killing. It's recognizing something which is written in our existential condition and is refined in the more advanced human beings:  animals cannot survive without sacrificing others, or sacrificing plants. There is a whole ecological chain which involves pain.  That pain becomes very intense in the human drama.  It's a reminder of that dark shadow that seems to be lurking always in our depths unless we are able to transmute it.  The Mass is transmuting what was originally the blood sacrifice into a higher level of transmutation. This process is embodied in the Kabbala, the Sephorotic tree. Tiphoreth represents the altar in the temple and the passage from human to the Divine. That's what we call fana in Sufism.  It is the readiness to give up something for something that we value more. 

These two powers, the secular and the sacred, are both vying, not one without the other, not the other without the other.  There is always nterdependence between the two, so application of the Divine guidance is ensured in the secular government.  Abraham represents a prototype of what government should be.  He had to lay down the law and give prescriptions to people which were meaningful at that time, but which are not necessarily meaningful to people now. Some of them are and some of them are not. Steering of human destiny remains on course by maintaining contact with our higher intuition of the Divine guidance. If we are not up to doing that in an authentic way, slipping into our own power trips, then we have the kind of deterioration that has developed in the forms of governments and political parties, and the mess in which we find ourselves today. 

In the consciousness of Abraham, we discover and arouse an impending propensity for authority that is linked with discipline.  This is quite the opposite of playing it by ear, permissiveness, slovenliness, untidiness, unruliness, or sloppiness. In scientific terms that's called entropy - like a library in which we don't put the books back, so it slips from order into disorder.  Then we have to work to put them back.  That's overcoming slipping on the slope of entropy by what is called negentropy. 

There are certain qualities within us. When we find ourselves in resonance with a being who has that quality, it is awakened in us.  The curious thing is that this authority is in some way derived from sacredness.  The sacred is quite impossible to define, it's something we feel, for example, in a church, or in a temple, a synagogue, or in a mosque.  We feel the need to protect this very fragile attunement in our being from the sacrilege of profanity, lack of respect for the dignity of the human being, and also of animals and plants, and all the covetousness, and concupiscence, and defilement, and power trips,  and manipulation developed in those people who have lost contact with that sacred element at the core of their being. So it's an attunement.  In order to honor and preserve that attunement, we need to express it in the form of orderliness, discipline, authority, patronage.
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The word that is closest to sacredness is Quddus.  We have ya Quddus  - ya Qaher. That's a wonderful combination, the way the authority comes from our sacredness which commands respect. People only follow someone they respect, and that of course starts with self respect.  It's a sense of carrying something sacred in our being.  People in a Catholic Church having Communion go back to their seat with the sense of carrying within them something sacred.  It's the support system of course.  It's the host.  Physically they are imbibing that, so they are carrying it in themselves. 

In Buddha we feel nobility.  He says, "Your realization results in your behaving with dignity."  Nobility is the inevitable consequence of our higher realization.  That word is Majid, nobility. Also it's translated as majesty.  We find it in Buddha. 

Melchizedek has holiness, which is very close to nobility, but it's not the same.  It's a kind of cleanliness.  In fact, we'll encounter it in the consciousness of the Virgin Mary because she typifies the immaculate condition of the core of our being, which cannot be tarnished by the impressions upon it.

 Christ 

Let us try to represent to ourselves Christ.  First Jesus, the historic Jesus, then the cosmic Christ, two dimensions of the same person.  The cosmic Christ is beyond time and space and becoming.  The human Christ represents a certain development of the Jewish religion.  The only way to bring about something new is to be a rebel, and he was a rebel. There is no point in my recounting the stories of the three wise men, and the shepherds, and the lights.  Astronomers have been able to ascertain that there was a comet moving in the sky at that time.  I think the important thing is that Jesus did his spiritual training amongst the Essenes.  Even amongst the Zoroastrians there was the expectation of a savior, a cathology which has always been present as a lure towards the future, moving us forward. 

The Essene order was very structured as is any order with a hierarchy of initiatic grades. Some people were supposed to predominate over other people by their grade. The older people had precedence over the younger people, and so on.  Some of the rules were rather incongruous.  If people had some kind of physical impediment, they couldn't be in the order.  If they had, for example, an amputated leg, or an eye that was non-functional they couldn't be a member of the order.  There were some limitations in that order, but it carried a very solid, authentic tradition that had developed amongst the Zoroastrians in Iran, and carried some of the teachings of Pythagoras from Egypt. 
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At a certain time there must have been some kind of revolution within the Essene order, because St. John the Baptist, who was also in the Essene order, recognized Jesus as the master they were awaiting.  Jesus was a rebel, as any strong person is; he wouldn't conform to the rules of the order.  For example,  there was a seniority status.  Jesus said, "The last will be the first and the first will be last."  He was countering the rules of that order.  If he had stayed and become the head of that order, his world mission would have never happened.  The message can never reach the world if it's confined in a school. 

They were both outcasts of the Essene order. It was very difficult to survive because there was no asylum in any home for outcasts from the Essenes. John had to live on locusts or whatever he found in the desert. In that alienation and loneliness, he developed great inner magnetism, exercising a great attraction for people who were drawn by his being. They didn't know what it was.  He would baptize them in water, which was like marking a definite step. That's what initiation is, a definite step, a commitment towards following the spiritual ideal.  As far as we know it wasn't followed by a teaching. Maybe it was. It's not clearly indicated. 
All Masters from the time of Adam till the time of Mohammad have been the one embodiment of the Master-ideal. When Jesus Christ is represented as saying, 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,' it is not meant that either the name or the visible person of Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega, but the Master-spirit within. It was this spirit which proclaimed this, moved by its realization of past, present, and future life, confident of its eternity. It is the same spirit which spoke through Krishna, saying, 'We appear on earth when Dharma is corrupted,' which was long before the coming of Christ. 
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Christ's teaching is totally unconventional and I would say democratic. Instead of overcoming the body and mind and so on, he washes the feet of his disciples, and he goes and sits in the taverns with the drunkards.  He honors a prostitute, saying, "Who will throw the first stone?" He is very challenging -  provocative. For example he went as far as to say, "I could destroy the temple and build it again."  He spoke words that didn't quite make sense, because people were suffering from the rule of the Roman Empire, like France under the Nazis.  It was a rule of iron.  They were careful not to violate what was holy for the Jews, but still there was a rebellion.  Judas was part of that rebellion.  People asked Christ, "You're talking about this kingdom of heaven. Should we go along with the rules imposed by the Romans? We have to pay a tax."  He said, "Give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God." Whereas Buddha discarded Caesar altogether.
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Instead of introducing another kingdom, which would have been challenging to the secular kingdom of the Jews and of the Roman Empire, he said of his disciples, "They are in the world but not of the world". That's something new. The sanyassins are not of the world nor are the ascetics.  He is introducing something. The prophetic mission in Israel was bringing the law to the people.  Christ wanted to carry that further and really bring into life the way of sacredness that he ascribed to the way of God. And that's why the Muslims call it the way of the saints rather than the way of the masters.  Jesus didn't give prescriptions -  pray 5 times a day, make the hajj, go to mass. That came later. 

How could we get into the consciousness of this being?  We start with the image, the picture, the idol of course.  We've seen the shroud of Turin, and know that it's been examined over and over again.  There is a lot of controversy about it.  The Vatican really stepped into it by declaring that it was a fake.  It's a rather rash decision involving the whole Catholic Church. We know that scientific theories always disprove the previous one, so we can't rely on carbon dating.  Is our gut feeling when we look at that picture, "Of course it's Christ. There is no question about it." It's not the blue eyed, blond young man presented as Christ by a lot of romantic pictures.  It's a very strong being.  It's a super being.  The dimension of that being is beyond the normal human frame if looked into deeply.  See how the picture leads us into that which transpires behind that which appears.  If it's photographed with ultraviolet it looks different again. We sense that other dimension that is beyond form.  Form leads to the non form. That's what the Sufis call Tawwil  - following the pug marks of the bear until we intercept the bear.  It's a journey of the mind.  It's not discarding the picture.  It's not destroying the idol.  It's using the picture as a springboard.  It's transmuting the form so it becomes less of a profile and more like the corona of Kirlian photography, or the photographs of Walter Chappell.  We can reach beyond form into diaphanous light - translucid, gossamer, and even beyond that where there is no form, getting into the attunement of Gethsemane and asking people to be with him.  They were all sleeping.  There was only one who responded.  It was like that.  Christ is still calling.  He is inviting us to get into his consciousness.  Instead of the historical fact, this is the real thing. 

His ultimate message, which has been articulated in the words, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," was wrongly translated.  What it really means, "Be of good cheer, those of you who are forlorn in life."  His message was for those who are floundering in life, for the poor, for the suffering, for the dejected.  That includes that part in ourselves where we feel dejected, or rejected, in our very vulnerable self-esteem.  That was his message.   Be of good cheer.  What he meant to say was said again by Pir-o-Murshid many centuries later, that defeat can aver itself to be a victory, and a victory can aver itself to be a defeat.  It shows how our assessment of our problems is totally unreliable, and can cause a lot of dismay and sense of failure and denigration of our person. That's what he is addressing. 
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Christ is proving it at the very limit between life and death. That last scene, the crucifixion, was a terrible fiasco.  His disciples didn't have the courage to affirm that they were his disciples.  They were scared of the violence of the Romans.  They were the same people who had cheered him on the Mount of Olives.  Such is the superficial nature of people's loyalty that when they saw him on the cross they said, "Ha, he said he could give us life eternal. He talked about life eternal. He talked about the kingdom of God and miracles. Well let's see if he can save himself."  What did he say? "Why hast thou abandoned me?" They said, "You see, it was a hoax." 

That fiasco turned out to be one of the greatest victories the world has ever known.  What seemed to be a crucifixion turned out to be a coronation, but one would have to have eyes to see it.  It could be looked at the other way around.  It could be like God saying to the people, "Why have you abandoned me?" There are always two sides. 

The whole human drama is right there. That's why it's been so significant for generations for millions of human beings.  It seems to be an exemplification of all the soul searchings and tribulations of humans and their little problems. That's why the message of Christ is cosmic.  It's not just a personal life but it has cosmic implications, a cosmic context. 

We can now do that same thing, not starting with a picture, but finding something in ourselves which is evoked by Christ, and lived out by Christ in his personal journey, something which really resonates with what's happening inside.  We can see in ourselves the way the Divine authority is usurped by the powers that be, who are self-appointed judges of our conscience in what I call the institutionalization of spirituality, which is religion.  We see that the authenticity in our being suffocates under the constraint of this effort to institutionalize the real spiritual experience and attunement. 

This was carried further in the case of Al Hallaj. It was one of the clearest examples of the way the institutionalization of Islam couldn't make any sense of the deep realization that Al Hallaj came to.  It was Al Hallaj who said, "When there is a stupid judge in the court, there is a victim on the cross."
All Masters from the time of Adam till the time of Mohammad have been the one embodiment of the Master-ideal. When Jesus Christ is represented as saying, 'I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end,' it is not meant that either the name or the visible person of Jesus Christ is the Alpha and Omega, but the Master-spirit within. It was this spirit which proclaimed this, moved by its realization of past, present, and future life, confident of its eternity. It is the same spirit which spoke through Krishna, saying, 'We appear on earth when Dharma is corrupted,' which was long before the coming of Christ.  
							Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Just imagine what happened with Joan of Arc.  Faced with the authority of the church, she had this very deep feeling that her inspiration was real.  Yet it was very difficult.  She was a young peasant girl.  Her accusers were learned people, and they must know.  There was doubt, and at the same time her doubt was not strong enough to suppress her very deep sense of the authenticity of her intuition.  There was a moment when she recanted. Then she came back again, and at that moment they tortured her.  We see that happening in the world, and not only amongst the Nazis. It happens throughout the world today, and has happened throughout history. 

Christ represents the downtrodden, those suppressed by the secular authority that keeps taking over any institution. Maybe the message of Christ reaches us in our adhesion to what our conscience is telling us, instead of the prescriptions of people who try to impose their will upon us.  That's where our quest for freedom is leading us in our day in age.  Nobody can tell us what we must do or can't do except when it might damage other people.  Nobody can make us what we're not or take away what we are. 
Fana is not necessarily a destruction in God. Fana results in what may be called a resurrection in God, which is symbolized by the picture of Christ. The Christ on the cross is narrative of Fana; it means, 'I am not.' And the idea of resurrection explains the next stage, which is Baqa, and which means, 'Thou art', and this means rising towards All-might. The divine spirit is to be recognized in that rising towards All-might. Fana is not attained by torturing oneself, by tormenting oneself, by giving 'oneself a great many troubles, as many ascetics do. For even after torturing themselves, they will not come to that realization if they were not meant to. It is by denying one's little self, the false self which covers one's real self, in which the essence of divine Being is to be found. 
								Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


 

Illumination of the Divine Names

by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan


Inspired by the Teaching of
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in 1995 in Tucson, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; and the Abode of the Message, New Lebanon, New York. The section entitled "Why the Wazifa"  was previously published as Keeping in Touch number 97; the section entitled "The Mystery of Sound"  is from from Pir Vilayat's forthcoming book on meditation.

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The Mystery of Sound

And He gave to Adam knowledge over all things, then presented them to the angels. Then He said: "Tell me the names of those if you are right."
Qu'ran 2.31

Traditionally sound (actually, vibration) stands as more primary than light.

In the beginning was the word.
	The Gospel according to John

Sound is associated with the code of that hologram that is the universe. The code is the matrix, what Shabistari describes as the basic reality. We could call this a complex of frequencies. For our senses to become aware of this code, it is helpful to translate it into a hologram of light so it is not only wave-like but also particle-like. Imagine this hologram now, beamed by the searchlight of our consciousness, which reveals the code. Transfixing the hologram with our inherent sense of meaningfulness will reveal its inherent code, and, what is more, unfurl its potentialities. Indeed, in the practice of the Dhikr, the Sufis work both with sound and with light.

The repetition of mantras, wazaif (plural of wazifa) in Sufism, appears as the staple food among the practices of most meditation schools. This is because it associates a sound pattern with an archetype of the unconscious, thus establishing and reinforcing a conditioned reflex. Indeed, the common ground of the human unconscious, called the collective unconscious by C. G. Jung, exhibits basic principles upon which our human psyche is built. This actually forms the seedbed, nurturing the seeds of the values we pursue and the qualities we unfurl in our personalities. In the unconscious they are stored holistically; in the conscious area of the psyche, they are personalized, customized as idiosyncrasies. The unconscious thinks holistically. That is, in our deep unconscious, we share the springhead of the psyches of all humans, indeed of what we might call the psyche of the universe. The conscious psyche understands reasons. For example, I need to develop such and such a quality to be better able to deal with this or that problem. However, the unconscious does not brook the limitations of human reason. The unconscious is endowed with the ability to grasp what the mind merely surmises of a quality far beyond our mental representations, infinity, for example, or perfection.

Like the buds of a plant, qualities are continually burgeoning at the threshold of the unconscious in a bid to blossom forth in our personality. They are paradoxically obstructed by our lack of faith in our capabilities, enshrouded in the unconscious, and by the way we limit ourselves to our totally inadequate self image. If we bypass our mental constructs, mind games and categorizations, the unconscious potentials can be aroused by imagery and sound. This is why the creative imagination is so important in unfolding our personality, invoking the hidden artist in us.
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That which our ears perceive as sound is really the way fluctuations of energy may manifest as pulsations of energy in the air, triggered off, for example, by our vocal cords or by a loudspeaker. These form wave-interference patterns which our brains extrapolate as sounds, and which we have been trained since childhood to associate with meaning. What's more, we only perceive a fraction of the intricate complex of sounds that our brains process for us, just as we could never explain all that we imply behind what we say.

Sound, then, evidences the effect of an energy wave (shabd in Sanskrit, saut e sarmad in Sufi terminology) upon the air. Sound is a more primary reality than light, since it is wave-like, rather than both particle like and wave-like. We are talking of a field that is spread out in space, rather than a particle that is located in space, traditionally called the Akashic field. It tends to affect our consciousness by modulating it to sense the deep underpinning of the springhead of life (the implicate state), discovered in the vacuum within even more intensely than we do in light, which we experience more readily as being external to ourselves.

The sound-wave interference pattern produced by all the objects in the universe, the wood of the trees, the burbling of water, the hissing of the wind, the vibrational patterns of the planets and stars and molecules and atoms, to cite a few examples - may well be considered as the holistic language of the universe.

There is some cryptic relationship between the signature tune of an object, a bell for example, and the geometrical pattern of its molecules. According to Pythagoras, mathematical equations are translated in the universe into harmonic structures. One may posit that the reality behind matter is its code, a patterning of energy frequencies bespeaking the language of the cosmos.

Some things can only be understood and appreciated by those who have experienced them personally. The mystical experience of sound is one of these. One would have to experience the effect of repeating uninterruptedly words which are pregnant with meaning, until the mind abandons its commonplace linear thinking and becomes receptive to a totally unforeseen, archetypal understanding which seems to be revealed from the far corners of the universe. When this is done for hours daily, for weeks in a cave or cell, one has the impression of having awakened from one's complacent accommodation to the limitations of our everyday conditioning. The emotion accompanying this breakthrough defies description.

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The Practice of Wazifa

One of the methods used in all authentic esoteric schools is the use of the mantra. For one thing it serves the purpose of affecting one's thinking, which is linear, whereas repetitions are circular; so it interrupts the inference of one thought's association with a subsequent thought. We get caught up in that pattern. In this sense, of course, it has the same effect as the circular motion of the Dhikr repetition.

The sounds themselves have a particular effect upon one. Also, there's an advantage in using words that are not in one's familiar language so one is more aware of the effect of the sound than if one is using familiar words. This is one reason for using exotic languages like Hindu or Arabic.

Also one is associating a thought. It's not just an ordinary thought; it's an archetypal thought with a sound. That's how we learn languages. That's called conditioned reflex, associating a sound with a archetypal thought. Maybe it is more than that. It's more like an attunement. Perhaps you know that the way to build a conditioned reflex is by repetition. That's the reason for the repetition: the unconscious takes messages by force of repetition. That's the circular path instead of the linear.

One must be on guard against what Christ called vain repetitions, the danger of automation. It has an advantage and a disadvantage. I remember sitting in cafes in Baghdad with all these men. It was very typical. They had their rosary in their right hand, telling their beads; they had a cigarette in their left hand, and they were drinking one cup of coffee after the other. So it becomes a kind of habituation, and, of course, then one loses all the value of it. That surely also happened at the time of Christ and he saw how counterproductive it can be.

It is true that if you learn to play the piano the unconscious takes over; but you always have to bring things back into consciousness again. You have to repeat the same scale or melody consciously, slowly, to get it just right. Then you bring it back into the unconscious again. That's why I advocate interrupting the repetitions at some point, depending upon the person and practice. One has to pay heed to a lot of things, the meaning of it, and so on. 

In my youthful guru-hunting days, I was up there in the Himalayas, looking for the ideal guru, having lost my guru, my father. Of course, I never found anyone like Murshid, but it was wonderful, sitting amongst a group of Sadhus, all sitting in a circle, an enormous rosary covering the whole group. They were all speaking "Ram, Ram, Ram," and this rosary was going around and around and around, and they were laughing. They were so full of joy that I thought to myself. "Gosh, I don't see that kind of joy among people watching TV. There's another kind of joy, but not that one."
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Of course it was because they were repeating the name of God, manifesting that legendary figure of Rama as the archetype. The wazaif of the Sufis are also the names of God, that is, the archetypal expression of the one and only being. The difference is the emphasis in Sufism on the covenant of allegiance. The origin of Sufism is really the futuwwah, the original chivalry, which had its ramifications in Europe after the crusades. Toward the end of the crusades, the troubadours used to bring back the legends of the knights. At a certain moment, there was a real tryst between the Christian and Muslim knights and they formed what is called a confraternity. In fact, the word Fatah was a password, "open the door." So it's chivalry which is establishing, by means of a pledge, functions and relationship between the vassal and the sovereign. Actually, it's a pledge to serve the government of the world. That is called hierarchy. There's a pledge but the pledge is of course with God. The sovereign is only functional to the extent to which s/he is serving that place where the buck stops, which is God, of course. If the sovereign acts in his/her own name then s/he is not really the sovereign anymore. S/he has forfeited his/her function because s/he may be the sovereign of the vassal, but s/ he is the vassal of God. That establishes the hierarchy. 

In Islam, in the Qu'ran, when we were still in the loins of Adam, in other words as sheer potentialities, we made a pledge. It was that pledge to affirm the Divine sovereignty that established our relative autonomy. That's an important word, relative autonomy, meaning we have autonomy as delegates or vice regents. We have free will, meaning there's a free range within the purview of our will but within the overriding configurement. The will of the sovereign, with which we established covenant, is carried further upwards. So there is containment. Our behavior is contained, and at the same time we are taking responsibility, which is of course a secret of leadership.

Now, in its esoteric meaning, the pledge you find in Sufism is the pledge to actualize the Divine Inheritance that is potential in our being. This would be contested by the orthodoxy of Sufism, the party line,but by definition, Sufis are heretics. Maybe the orthodox Sufis would emphasize the delegation rather than thinking we carry that Divine inheritance, that we carry within ourselves the genes of the universe. There are indications of that. Occasionally I have a physicist come to me and say, "you know, Pir Vilayat, you said that and it contradicted what we knew then. New discoveries have shown that indeed there are genes in the DNA of the body that do not account for the functions of the body."  
	
So let's say we do carry that cosmic inheritance, not just at the cosmic scale, but at all levels. In one's meditation, one reaches a point where one understands what Buddha was saying when he refers to the world of possibilities. Buddha says it's beyond existence although it's really subsumed in the existential state. It's like the software behind the hardware if you think of the software as being infinite. Even being infinite, it can still increase; our concepts of infinity are very limited. We limit our concept of God, for instance, by thinking S/He needs to be unchanging. You could say that repeating a wazifa is making a possibility actually happen. It is making dreams come true. It does require more than concentration; it requires faith. 

Now there's an issue about the meaning of faith and the meaning of belief and what we mean by these two words. For me belief is based upon evidence, authority; for example, it's in the Bible or the Koran, or in the wisdom of someone who says it, so your belief rests upon the opinion of that person. For me, faith would be an inner conviction that does not rest upon either authority or any kind of proof whatsoever. In fact, it prevails in the face of the proof of the opposite. That's my own definition of these words and it might be the other way around, that faith is based upon the text of the scriptures and belief is one's own conviction. Maybe you should just use the word conviction instead of belief, because it lends itself to error. 
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As I say, it's not because the Sufis say it or I say it or the prophets of religion say it. It's because you are convinced that behind all we're experiencing is such an incredible bounty of beingfullness, such richness, and you are convinced you really carry that bounty in yourself. Maybe that is the critical point in Christ's teaching. It was also the crux of a real breakthrough in the life of Saint Francis. Perhaps you know that story. He was the son of a very rich cloth merchant. He was serving in his father's shop and then he left and started rebuilding a church and using any money he had from his father to help the poor. His father called him before the court, and said, "He owes me everything he has, even the clothes he wears." So they took away his clothes, and Francis said, "You're not my father." Just imagine what that means. The Majarishi said that about his mother. He said to his mother, "You're not my mother." These are very cruel things to say, but it is a recognition of another fatherhood about which Christ spoke. 

That is the meaning of inheritance. One inherits the features of one's father and  mother. One's conviction comes by sensing, by espying those genes in one's being. You can't say, "I'm the son of God," unless you experience it. That's what Christ was saying, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." He didn't say, "I'm the only son." His followers said that, but he didn't.

There is no point in repeating a wazifa unless you have some sense of carrying that quality in your being already. Don't think you can develop a quality that isn't there. You are just awakening a quality.

It's also true to say there are levels of that quality, ranging from your idiosyncrasies to the archetypal level of that quality. You're able to perfect yourself by establishing a connection between these levels, between the idiosyncrasies that have already unfurled in your personality and the archetype of which your idiosyncrasies are the exemplars. The difference between an archetype and an exemplar is like the difference between rosehood and roses, or roundness and round objects. So it takes more than a way of thinking to be able to encompass more (what we mean by the archetype). Otherwise, it's just one more word. We have inherited in our nature this ability to reach beyond whatever we have reached so far. There is always a further place in space or an earlier time in history or further time in the future, There is always a more perfect quality than the most wonderful quality we could imagine. That's written right into our thinking. That kind of thinking typifies the level of Lahut. It's like the grid behind all that we've been doing.

I've been encouraging people to identify with their magnetic fields because that frees them from a basic limitation in our way of thinking, the idea of "me" and "the world other than me." As we do that we begin to grasp a deeper reality behind that which transpires. We might even find ourselves in a transfigured world. Iseems to be a deeper reality than our physical bodies, the template in which the body and the cells are configured, in a pattern like what has been photographed in Kirlian photography. When you identify with that volatile aspect of your being, then your thinking is different. Now your thinking is not a reaction to your experience. By the power of imagination, you are projecting from inside yourself a more concrete expression of yourself, into a form or into forms. Imagery is connected to the words maya and the magi and magic. It is imagination, it's magic. The whole world is built upon the magic of imagination. A computer was imagined once upon a time and now it's being made.
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Tibetans call that the subtle mind and the Sufi word is Mithal. I don't believe there's an etymological connection with the word mythology, but think of the word metaphor. Think of the way ideas configure themselves into forms to become known. Vedanta recognizes four levels of consciousness. In the first, consciousness is experiencing "other than itself;" it assumes what it is experiencing is other than itself. In the second level, what one is experiencing is the way one projects the potentialities of oneself into forms. This corresponds with sleep, with dreams. There's another level where that which one experiences is not projected into forms. Ibn'Arabi speaks about that level where you have to give up the imaginary faculty of the mind. When you are using the imaginary faculty of the mind you are still working at the level of Mithal. I suggest that when you are trying to establish some rapport with a particular quality at the level of Mithal, that is if you have stopped trying to interpret the experience of the world and are turning within as you meditate, then you should imagine that quality projected as a form. 

A lot of the wazaif are accompanied by a mental representation in terms of imagery. For example, with Wahabo, one can imagine sitting along a stream of water. You could invent your own image. Find one that seems to typify that particular quality with which you are working. One doesn't know it at first, but the extraordinary thing is that the countenance of one's etheric body somehow gets configured in the form one is projecting. For example, if you are walking along a lake, perhaps in the sun, or in the moonlight, there's not just the outer scenery that does reflect something of your being. The kind of personality you discover as you're doing that is an aspect of yourself that has now become a little more configured, a little more formed in some gestalt, an etheric form, a countenance. In other words, you're really sculpturing, or fashioning your etheric body by your attunement with this particular wazifa, this particular quality. 

Then you may be working with another quality, for example compassion, and you think of someone who has just been wounded and you're trying to help that person assuage his/her pain. So another configuration comes in. You could say the etheric body is malleable and consequently, if you keep on reiterating these attunements, that particular configuration becomes indelible, adamant, or at least more resilient. That's why one could say the etheric being is many faceted. Think of the words of the Qu'ran: all faces are the face of God, different facets of the one face.

At the level of Mithal your thinking is dynamic rather than static. You think of yourself as a process of unfurlment rather than thinking, "This is me." The consequence is that it carries within the importance of hope, whereas if you think, "This is me," right away you are shutting the doors of hope. This is me, take it or leave it, that's a very limiting thought.

If you go to an esoteric school, what you expect to get out of the school is awakening, personal awakening. Pir-o-Murshid said it is the awakening of humanity, a global awakening, to the Divinity. He said awakening to the Divinity of man. I say "to the Divinity in the human being, which is the Divine inheritance, the awakening of the Divine inheritance. That is the reason for the accent on the wazaif in the Sufi Order. Because by so doing one is awakening one's Divine inheritance, which is the God within.
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You know that if you fragment a magnet, every fragment has a north pole and a south pole, or positive pole and negative pole. Complementarity is written right into life. In the ascetic view it seems like the world is illusion, maya. The ultimate wit behind the whole story is that what was supposed to be illusion is the reality, and that God is a virtuality. What we mean by God is the virtuality and the reality is right here. Now that's a real jolt for those who feel they are living in a world of illusion. It puts one's feet right on the ground if one can still keep one's head in the heavens. I know that we would like to develop qualities in ourselves. We look to the wazaif because we would like to have a little more compassion, or a little more truthfulness, or a little more peace or so on. It will never work that way because we're forgetting the totality and highlighting at the individual. We are forgetting to look at things from the Divine point of view.

There was in the time of Murshid a French psychiatrist. Murshid was very interested in psychology at the time. This psychiatrist used to make people say European wazaif like, "Je suds tres fort, Je suds tres fort," to help people gain a little more confidence. You could never become like Abraham or like a dervish by saying, "Je suds tres fort, Je suds tres fort." It takes more than that. Still, Murshid was very interested. He thought, well, that's what we're trying to do with the wazaif but we're not doing it that way because actually we bring God into it. If you try to do it without God then it doesn't work. To awaken the Divine inheritance in your being, that is organic.

I've come to the conclusion that you have to consider the teaching as a whole rather than separating it into bits. It's an integrity. Understanding something you hadn't seen before, the "aha" feeling, triggers off the unfurling of the qualities in our being. I don't think you can just work with these qualities without looking at the whole. That's the reason we have the Dhikr instead of just the wazaif. Using the wazaif is the way we concentrate on a particular aspect of God in our being, because it's difficult to concentrate on all the aspects, and because that's the way that God becomes a reality as us.

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Why the Wazifa?

The effectiveness of our practice of the wazaif presents us with a paradox:  it depends entirely upon our realization, while on the other hand it confers realization. It only works in the Sufi perspective of always looking at oneself from two complementary points of view,  the personal and the way things look from the complementary (or opposite) point of view to one's own, which the Sufis call the Divine point of view. It requires us to push our point of view beyond its limitations in infinite regress, and therefore spells emancipation from simplistic, commonplace thinking. This would be aptly illustrated by our mind's ability to always imagine a number greater than the number which we have envisioned so far. Without this dimension of vision, a wazifa is not a wazifa and therefore cannot be effective. If it is practiced as a method of boosting psychological idiosyncrasies, it cannot possibly work. It would be simplistic to assume a wazifa is a prescription to develop a certain quality. This would be missing out on the very seed bed out of which our personality may blossom.

However, in Sufism, this complementarily honors our incentive to  participate in our own creativity by opening ourselves to the revelation of the Divine skill whereby the Divine artist fashions us each uniquely. This requires us to be sensitive to our intuition of a completely different way of thinking and emoting than our own. Here we recognize two factors in our creativity, unfurling latencies by the power of imagination (at the Mithal level) and actualizing impersonal or transcendent archetypes (at the Lahut level) into our personalities, which are their exemplars. Such is spirituality. It represents a further dimension, complementary to the purely psychological one. It is always challenging, unforeseeable, perplexing and exhilarating!

 Articulating a Realization by Means of an Idiom 

The Sufis seek the fulfillment of the purpose of life which requires cultivating that precious gift of the universe to us, our human personality. Hence the importance of the wazaif amongst all our spiritual practices. As we know, the prime orientation in Sufism is awakening in life. However in the Sufi sense, to awaken in life, one does need to unfurl one's potentialities, and this requires integrating all levels of one's being, wholistically rather than holistically.

The wazifa is the practice of invoking a Divine name repetitively. The name Ism Ilahi or Asma'ul Husna is a label conveying a quality.

With us the name of everything is its outward form; with the Creator it's inward essence.
	Rumi

The Divine names are relations, not ontological realities, occasioned by the entities of the possible things.
	Ibn'Arabi
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A mental association is established between the word and its archetypal meaning. By mentioning the "name," one evokes the meaning.

Then God makes him journey through His names in order to show him His signs. Thus the servant comes to know that he is designated by every name. It is through these names that God appears to the servant.
	Ibn'Arabi

In our human understanding, we ascribe a quality to a person or ourselves, but if we envision this quality as God's quality manifesting in us, it will open up our personality to a totally different spectrum, magnitude and status. The Sufis consider the idiosyncrasies of our personality as the exemplars of the Divine archetypal qualities. To unfurl these we need to refer back continually to their archetype. The exemplar is known by means of the archetype. For example if we know a table is round, it is because roundness is inherently written into our sense of meaningfulness, and contrariwise, the archetype is known by means of the exemplar. For example, after having seen many roses, a child sees their  difference from lilies.

 Stages of Development 

When practicing the wazaif, it is important to assess at which stage you are, and assess the next step in order to progress. But one must never skip a stage, otherwise, one may have to backtrack. Following are the developmental stages of the Sufi initiate with regard to the wazaif:

1.	The Empirical Level: Nazut
Typical Wazifa: Ya Zahir

The dawning of the evolution of consciousness is evidenced by the rudimentary sensory, perceptual experience, accompanied by the commonplace naive interpretation. "I feel this object. It is hard, prickly, round. I feel cold, hungry, angry." This represents a rudimentary stage of human thinking. Any physicist will confirm that matter is not the way it feels or looks. By the same token, our emotions can lead us into subjective make-believe. So our interpretation of experience could be understood as this is the way things look from a particular vantage point. It represents therefore a limited opinion, bearing upon a sliver of the situation. For example, "Notre Dame in Paris looks like this," neglecting that this is only the way it is seen from a certain angle and it looks totally different from another angle; or again a light-buoy should not be mistaken for the haven. Realization lies a long way ahead! That is the objective of those who are seeking for greater understanding

The same applies to elementary subjective statements which bespeak that the person is caught in a personal, hence biased, perspective. The only therapy is to pull oneself out of that perspective and see things from alternate perspectives. This applies to our perfunctory interpretation of events in which we are involved, which we judge from our personal bias and take for granted.
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These are the trite modes of thinking that Yoga brands as illusory, or rather deluding maya. The Sufi view highlights the way of avoiding being caught up in them, by considering them to be clues or signposts. They should never be taken for granted, but could lead to the meaningfulness toward which they point. This is what awakening is about. The signpost has fulfilled its purpose when one has left it behind. Lingering in these perfunctory judgments is getting into a rut without issue. 

We shall show them our signs at the horizons and in themselves.
	Qur'an
At the Nazut level, the adept recognizes, in the many-splendored aspects of nature, clues (ayat) matching qualities that are meaningful to him/her. For example a lake at moonlight, peace, a colorful dawn, splendor. For the Sufis, at this stage God, wrapped in mystery, reveals Him/Herself through these clues. Earmarking these clues will make the wazaif that evoke them more meaningful.




Zahir 

Zahir means coming forth with all the light in your being. 
It's the epiphany. Zahir means exactly epiphanos, the appearance of light. 
The three wise men who visited Christ, they are the epiphany. 


In composers and in mystics, in all creative people, there is great suffering somewhere, much more than one could ever imagine, like crucifixion. What can result from crucifixion is not just resurrection; it is joy. One can really only give joy to people. One's joy is not facetiousness. Real joy is possible only if one knows what real suffering is. Sometimes one thinks one would like to be able to transmute suffering into joy, but I think that's a misconception. I think one has to live with the suffering. I don't think you can hope to transmute it like that. No, it takes both rain and sunshine to make a rainbow. It's a combination of both at the same time. 
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We tend to feel we need to be loyal to our suffering, and we all need to be on guard against our desire to "fix" things.  I would be inclined to say, "Okay, we'll try to overcome your suffering. I'll have you do ya Hayy, which really means energy. It doesn't necessarily mean joy, but ya Hayy is as close as you can get to it, particularly if you combine it with ya Zahir. That would be if I were to try to fix it. I could remember what Al Hallaj said: "Thy abandonment of me is a proof of Thy love because Thou testeth most whom Thou lovest most."

Murshid said one is tested in one's love and in one's detachment. It is also true that one is tested in one's faith. When one says faith, one thinks one means 'God up there,' but it is the faith in the 'God within one' that one is most gravely tested. That is called faith in ones self of course, although when we use the word self we are inveigled into identifying with ones limited sense of ones self, whereas it means, of course, the God within.

The wazifa won't do it for you. What it will do is draw your attention to an aspect of your being that you perhaps had not highlighted, and by so doing, awaken that aspect of your being. We're really saying we need all the qualities. It's terrible to say, "Well, we'll just focus on this quality, and then there's all these other qualities. They're totally different for each person - and they work with each other in different configurations and in different ways.



2. 	The Psychological Level: Khayal
Typical Wazifa: Ya Alim

At the Khayal level, we are on the lookout for clues whereby God reveals Him/Herself through the way a paramount model of excellence, which Sufis ascribe to the Divine nature, is exemplified in our own personality. Once more, we will gain some sense of the Wazaif as we pinpoint the personality feature they evoke in ourselves.





Alim
 
Alim is the knowledge and wisdom we are gaining 
by our experience on earth.

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Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world is man and man is a world.
                                                                     Mahmood Shabistari

You have to let go of thinking of yourself as one who is experiencing as a spectator, and then, as the Sufis say, the Divine intelligence reveals itself to your consciousness. As you exhale, the intelligence acts as a catalyst to trigger off the radiance of your eyes. So you are not simply radiating, boomeranging back the light you absorbed through your glance or through your aura, nor are you simply radiating the inner light. However, both of these are greatly enhanced by the light of intelligence that acts as a catalyst. That's the meaning of the light upon the light. 

Now this is always accompanied by a real breakthrough of realization. This is a key to illumination, but it's always associated with realization, realization and awakening and illumination together. All of a sudden it's as though all you ever thought or believed, all your assessments break down, as in the dark night of the mind. If you hang on to it then there is no way of opening up to another perspective. For the Sufis it is not knowledge that one can acquire. It's a knowledge that's revealed to one. Then it becomes insight into situations and problems, insight into the physical world. 

Therefore Pir-o-Murshid talks about two different types of knowledge, the knowledge of the heavens and the knowledge of the earth.The knowledge of the earth is the wisdom you acquire in your experience. The knowledge of the heavens is not acquired. It is always present, but virtual or latent until you no longer rely upon the wisdom of experience.  It's a kind of pre-knowledge, prior to the existential state, inborn in us, inherent.  These two forms of knowledge can be represented by ya Alim and ya Khabir.  Alim, the wisdom by earthly experience and Khabir, what one might call purely intuitive, protocritic cognizance, not based upon experience but always present within.  Here you see the relevance of detachment and indifference, the ascetic way to awakening in life, because if you rely upon your personal judgment you will be missing out on the insight gained by letting the Divine intelligence reveal itself to you.  It's letting go, being indifferent to your opinion.  Buddha says freedom from opinion.  It's interesting to see how the practice of light leads toward realization. 

I know the word Khabir is rather ambiguous and can be used in many different senses.  Sometimes it means being very conscious, very aware of the here-and-now.  One can bend these words sometimes to mean what is helpful to us in our unfoldment. Therefore in my interpretation, Alim is the knowledge we are gaining by our experience on earth.  Khabir is a kind of inherent, protocritic knowledge hidden in the depth of our soul and revealed to us. You can't acquire it by experience. It is revealed when Alim fails, when we discover the limits, the deceptive nature of Alim.  Then we go through the dark night of the mind.  Then all of a sudden it's Khabir.

Ibn'Arabi talks about different ways whereby God reveals Him/Herself. One way is through the ayat, the clues in the world, or in your person. There is one stage where he says, "then you drop the imagination that is forms." No more forms. That includes qualities. All that remains is that "You know God by Himself, not by His revelation of Himself through you." That's Khabir. Pir-o-Murshid says that wisdom arises out of the conjoining of the wisdom of the earth and the wisdom of the heavens, in other words of these two forms of knowledge.

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3.	The Introspective Level: Arwah
Typical Wazifa: Ya Batin

At the Arwah level, we are trying to stalk the Divine nature transpiring through that which appears, making allowances for the fact that there is bound to be distortion and defilement in those very precarious and perishable signs, rather than relying upon our interpretation of events. Here we find the converse. Rather than searching for the quality evoked by the wazifa in our personality, such as it is, we capture it trying to surface in our personality as it unfolds.

The one who tunes himself not only to the external, but to the inner being, and to the essence of all things, gets an insight into the essence of the whole being, and therefore he can, to the same extent, find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty of the flower.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As we discover the more germane inner lining of our psyche, we will become aware of the need to debunk the hoax of our psychological projections upon our problems whereby we deceive ourselves by our own assessments of our problems.

Thought grasps the form of the object directly without the help of categories; illusion and imagination; done away with impressions [samsara]; all antecedent mental functions are destroyed.
	Eliade



Batin

Ya Batin is the manner in which God is hidden 
in His/Her Creation.


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As we turn within we learn to identify with the life of our life or the seed of the plant of our being. The seed is very fundamental in the teaching of Murshid. In different passages he refers to the seed. In one he simply says one gets to a point where one can see in the seed the plant. It's an intuitive kind of knowledge. For example, if you are looking at people, if you're a guide and trying to guide people, you don't assess people upon the strength of their personalities. You're really assessing them on the seed of their beings and you realize that all they see they identify with their personalities. If you can see the root of their being, or the seed of their being (sometimes the root is the same as the seed, in a bulb for example), then they see themselves through your eyes, because teaching is really mirroring. When we're looking for ourself in another ourself, that's the outer being looking for ourself in our outer self. We seek to discover the root of our being as we turn within. We can't find it in another person, however wonderful a teacher s/ he may be. We can find it if we are able to attune to the tawajeh, to the attunement of the teacher from within. That's a kind of mirroring because then we discover not our personality, but the root of our personality, the seed. Of course Murshid goes further and says the seed is recycled in the plant, and it emerges again at the end of the cycle of the plant in the heart of the flower. 

The seed of our being, which is the ground of our personality, is trying to emerge, and in order to do so it needs to emerge as the features of our renewed personality. Ultimately, hopefully, it will all of a sudden appear in the heart of that flower, the flower of our personality. Pir-o-Murshid said, "God is hidden in His creation."  So God is hidden in us. That's the meaning of the word Batin; it's hidden in us. God is hidden in us and we have all these projections. We're trying to find God in a teacher, in the world, and in all these different aspects of ourselves. 

Finally, Ibn'Arabi says, "By contemplating ourselves, we contemplate God." Yes, it's still a device because what do we mean by ourselves? One sees qualities emerging. Those are ayat, those are signs to which we refer, as clues, about the seed behind those qualities that are emerging. That requires a further stage in our development when we cease to earmark the qualities that emerge, but go deeper and realize that what is emerging is something much more universal than what we think we are. In fact, ultimately, the seed is a further step towards diversity, each seed being a further step towards God, the unique, the seed of all seeds that is emerging in each of us from within. 

The practices for that do require one to offset one's consciousness from first of all identifying with the adapted dimension of one's being, and also from looking outside to find ourselves, including in a master. Eventually one realizes that God is the master, and the master may appear in different forms, and that's what is trying to appear within oneself. There are great moments that Murshid describes, for example, "when you discover in yourself the same power by which the whole Universe was created."



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4. The Level of Metaphor (Creative Imagination): Mithal
	Typical Wazifa: Ya Khaliq

At the Mithal level, the level of metaphor, we consciously participate in the creativity of our personality by unfurling potentialities lying in wait, realizing that our creativity customizes the Divine creativity.

The soul of man is the spirit of the Creator, and therefore has within it the same power of creating by the power of mind as his Creator has.
	Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

At this level we capture the seedling sprouts of our personality as they are surfacing, by translating reality in the mental and emotional mode into evanescent forms.
Thus the ascensions of saints are the ascensions of their spirit, triggering off the visions of their hearts whereby they perceive forms in the intermediary world of embodied spiritual realities.
	Ibn'Arabi
Here all the essential realities of being are manifested in real images.... So what the soul shows to itself is precisely its own image, since the earth it projects directly reflects the image premeditated by the soul.
	Corbin



Khaliq

To be actuated, our creative fantasies need to be conceptualized at a mental level. 
That contrasts with interpreting events, because they emerge spontaneously,
 undetermined and unpredictably. 
Therefore it is not a linear reaction to the challenge of the environment. 
However, the challenge acts as a catalyst, perpetrated surreptitiously through the unconscious. 
Concepts still need to be fashioned into spatial forms, 
then matter needs to be molded into that template.

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At this stage, we realize God is revealing His/Her qualities (sifat) which we evoke in our wazaif in the unfurling of His/Her nature as our personality, albeit restricted by the very limitations we wreak upon this process by our own assessment of what we think are our qualities or defects. Interestingly, these spontaneous thoughts that seems to arise from within and coalesce into images are clues as to how God is trying to manifest through me, and as me, by the qualities that I am awakening in myself. This requires of us to reverse our vantage point in order to discover ourselves through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through our physical form.
God describes Himself to us through ourselves. I know God through the knowledge that God has of Himself through me.
Ibn 'Arabi
Turning within is not discarding the environment but looking at it in a very different way. If I say a different vantage point, we might think that vantage point is a point. So I would say in a different setting of consciousness. There is a further aspect of turning within. Pir-o-Murshid says this about breath but it's also true about consciousness. If consciousness finds there is some kind of obstruction to its reaching outward, then it turns within. Consequently now you downplay your receptivity towards the experience of outside. You're interpreting the experiences, and what is more not only experiencing but ingesting the experience from outside. 

Let's say you put a halt to that, or at least suspend it for a short while, so you can highlight what is happening as you turn within. Then you discover a whole different aspect. You discover the Universe emerging from within, irrespective of whatever accrues to you from outside. As I've already said, the beauty is not conditioned by what we call causality, but it is totally spontaneous. What is more, this is where you discover your freedom, because, and we have to be very clear about this, nature has a way of self-organizing, and if you interfere you will hinder the work of nature, the Divine programming. At a certain point our will customizes that formative process, that morphogenesis. Pir-o-Murshid says it very well: God can attain a high degree of perfection in a person, but if that person participates in his/her own creativity, God can attain a greater degree of perfection.

Somehow what is gained by the Universe is the individual, the way the totality is customized in each individual, and therefore results in tremendous diversity. So honor your own wish to be the way you want to be while nature is preparing things for you. You then can have some impact on your creativity at a certain point by projecting how you could be if you would be as you might be. It's a real vision because, as the Sufis say, it is creative imagination that makes the transit from the abstract world to the existential plane. It is translating meaningfulness into form. Therefore your visualization of yourself as you could be, even as a very concrete physical form (personality is also a form), will enhance your impact upon the environment.

There is always some relationship, some balance, between the degree that we adapt ourselves to the environment, and the degree that we adapt the environment to our own sense of purpose. You can see if we simply adapt ourselves to the environment, we have a sense of inadequacy, frustration. We're playing a role. We're wearing a mask and we're not really honoring ourselves or doing justice to all the possibilities in our being. As we turn within, we discover our real being, not the role we're playing, not our mask. We encounter the pattern which then can be unfurled in our personalities. We see how that does alter the situation outside. We can't alter the situation outside, but by altering ourselves or at least unfurling possibilities in ourselves, then those situations are going to alter.

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The Sufis recognize imaginary forms as being valid aspects of reality, as real as the physical world, perhaps even more so. That's the world of Mithal, the level of metaphor, a very great power, the power of transformation. As Pir-o-Murshid says, the Divine creativity is carried further by man. As one moves upwards, towards awakening beyond life, as Ibn'Arabi says, the images fall apart. Do you see that these are devices? The Tibetans call it the illusory body, illusory because it's maya. It's magic, it's imagination, it's a means of revealing meaningfulness. This is where you get to a threshold kind of situation where you can fashion your aura of light like a sculpture, the way you want. Rather, your attunement in your realization is going to pass into your imaginary faculty and will fashion that fabric of light, in a way that says something about your real self. For example the attunement of a composer is going to be translated in the form of the melody, harmony, or rhythm of his/her compositions. This is where the language of wazaif is very useful. Just think, you have all these qualities in your being, and at any time you can focus on just one quality. The beauty is that the language here is not confusing; it is different from our ordinary language. It's like a signal, that this particular word has consequences and relevance.

If you can translate the wazifa in terms of a form in the fabric of your aura, the fabric of light, then it's most revealing because that imagination translates meaningfulness into form, and that's what life is about, the revelation of pure meaningfulness. Then you reach a threshold state which is the celestial counterpart that is not like the light of your aura. It's light in a sense, but not in the physical sense. It definitely does not have a profile. It changes all the time; it is much more malleable than your aura or your face. It responds to your emotional attunement much more than to your will. In fact it doesn't respond to your will, or even to your realization. Yoga calls it Ananda Samadhi. That is the samadhi of emotion, of ecstasy. That higher body of yours is fashioned by the emotion of glorification in the way glorification is translated into form. Look at the forms of the cathedrals or the mosques or the synagogues or the temples of the ancient world. It's extraordinary to see how emotion can be translated into form, and how the form itself is going to awaken the emotion. Your inner body can be formed just like a cathedral, by the inspiration of your act of glorification. 

In order to do that one has to recover the innocence of the child that is still in one. One has to not just discard, but reject any kind of manipulative tendencies in one's ego. One becomes defenseless in fact. You're very vulnerable. Perhaps you know that Murshid distinguishes between two types of angels, those that are prior to incarnation, who have not incarnated and perhaps do not incarnate, and those who are after incarnation. These first are like children; he calls them embryonic. That's one aspect of your being, the purity at the core of your being that is immaculate and can never be sullied by whatever you do or by the impressions of the world. It is very gratifying to know that. Somehow one can reverse one's creative process to get back to the original state of the embryo and then, from there, start growing again. 

Then as Pir-o-Murshid said, there are angels who, having once incarnated, are now disincarnated. They carry all the wisdom of the experience of the earth, and have a kind of maturity. Of course it's a great art to be able to integrate that innocence with that maturity and wisdom. That's what we mean by the masters.

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5. 	The Celestial Level: Malakut 
Typical Wazifa: Ya Quddus

At the Malakut level, the recollection of our celestial nature, to which we attune ourselves, awakens qualities in our self-creativity which would not have arisen if we had continued to identify with our psychological self-image.

As man evolves, he ceases to look down on earth, but looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.
                                                                  Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

This is triggered off by giving vent to our aspiration toward the sublime and the sacred.
Man's grade of evolution depends upon the pitch he has attained; it is a certain pitch that makes him conscious of a certain phase of life.
                                                                    Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This will awaken our memory of deja vu prior to our birth. God acquaints them with what corresponds to them in each world by passing with them through the different worlds.
                                                                                             Ibn'Arabi

However it does require us to let go of our commonplace self-image.

Now their journey in God involves the dissolving of their composite nature and acquaints them with what corresponds to them in each world of being, by passing with them through the different sorts of worlds.
	                                                             Ibn'Arabi 

The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes.
                                                                Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

At this point in our evolutionary development, we are living an active and effective reciprocity between ourselves and God, that is, between the qualities that have been actualized in our personality and the many splendored potentialities that are still latent. It is the legacy of the Divine archetypes manifest in our celestial counterpart, but somewhat defiled in those exemplars of the archetypes of our being that are our idiosyncrasies.

It is only by glorification that our celestial nature reveals itself to us. Thus our celestial nature serves as a bridge in that reciprocal action between God and man, or between the Divine and human poles of our being.

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Have Me present to your heart, I shall have you present in myself.
Qur'an

Therefore according to the Sufis, "we know God through the knowledge that God acquires by our discovering God's qualities in our idiosyncrasies." This antinomy is found in Ibn'Arabi's description of two fundamental spiritual developmental stages: the second being, "I know God through the knowledge that He has of Himself by my discovering Him."



Quddus

The quickening of the Holy Spirit


As you reach beyond multiplicity of qualities, of the seeds, Bija in Yoga, you reach into the sense of the Divine essence which can never be fragmented. It's not multiple, not manifold. It's the heart of the unity. When you hold your breath you experience the investment of the Holy Spirit, which is the essence, in your heart. It is not samadhi; you were moving upwards, and now it is the other way around. You are being passive toward the holy spirit on the altar, and we call it the quickening of the Holy Spirit, Quddus. If you think of your celestial being as fashioned in celestial light, it triggers off a new mode of understanding. You reach seeds of Divine perfection, Divine qualities, and then unity. As you hold your breath, you experience the descent of the holy spirit in the temple, the holy space that you have secured. Out of the fabric of your own being a temple has been consecrated. It is really God who is reborn in each one of us, and instead of thinking of yourself as being reborn, you see the whole Universe emerging, recurrently, as each of us. This is ex nihlo, not determined, not subject to causality, purely spontaneous.

The wheel of fire in Tibetan Yoga corresponds with the thymus gland. It's very important. The heart corresponds to your aura; it's the center of your aura. The thymus, the wheel of fire, is the center of celestial light rather than the physical light of the aura. Your aura already does espouse the contours of your body, particularly your face, but your celestial body is less of a form. It's very elusive. It's just at the edge of what we may still call configuration, rather than form. 

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For each identity there is a certain mode of thinking. If you identify with your celestial being, your thought is not based upon the experience of the earth. That's when you concentrate on the throat center. The Sufis talk about the plane of all possibilities, and they call it the Divine treasury. There's nothing in the existential realm that does not have its correspondence in the treasury. Ibn'Arabi says there are ladders linking the treasury to the celestial sphere. In Sufism one never considers the negative aspect without the positive counterpart; so while one is experiencing the disintegration of one's being one's consciousness is encompassing the bounty of the universe that is coming through the body of God. It is thanks to the disbanding of the notion of the physical world or ourselves or our problems that we can grasp the value of what is coming through in the Universe and in ourselves and in our problems.




6.	The Level of the Divine Knower as Our Intelligence: Jabarut
	Wazifa: Ya Shahid


At the Jabarut level, we can see that our realization of the full implications of each wazifa changes dramatically if we reverse our assumption of being the spectator and invite the Divine Witness to illuminate our point of view.
You thought that you were the Spectator, the witness (Shahid) of what you experience, but the real witness in you is your angelic counterpart - the witness in the heavens.
	Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi
The consequence is we can now see how our assessment of our self-image was based upon our perception of our personal idiosyncrasies, and how this perspective on our identity was standing in the way of, and thwarting, the actualizing of the bounty in store at the Lahut level of our being, those seminal qualities or attributes (sifat) which we invoke in our wazaif. If we let the Divine witness presiding over our consciousness prevail over our personal perspective, what breaks through is an inherent knowledge accessed through the act of intelligence rather than of consciousness that was being blocked by our judgment. It liberates us from our self-image and floods our awareness, "awakening the God within" as Pir-o-Murshid says.
When consciousness is not conscious of anything, it is resorbed in its ground which is intelligence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Man attains insight into meaningfulness from the Divine mind that confers form to material beings. Therefore, to obtain insight into meaningfulness, do not obstruct the gift from above, by excessive attachment to the perceptual reality.
Avicenna



Shahid

You identify with Shahid, which is the Divine witness 
and your consciousness is just the lens 
through which this intelligence functions.

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At first one has to downplay one's interpretation, at least caution oneself against it's unreliability. Eventually, however, the insight that's revealed to one from inside is going to alter one's interpretation of the situations, so you are aware of your interpretation, but now it is corrected. The witness (shahid) at the Malakut level, the celestial level, is your celestial being. 

We are many tiered beings, with several identities. So if you identify with your body or your psyche, then you're going to interpret things the way that everybody does. If you identify yourself with your celestial counterpart -- you can't do it with your will, but simply by a very high attunement, by the power of ecstasy -- then you look at the world, from a totally different angle. There is a question of one's identity here, and it's identity that determines one's way of thinking and one's realization. One can't attain realization just like that. It always has to do with a change of one's sense of identity, or of discovering levels of identity of which one was not aware.

Imagine that one is a visitor on planet Earth, a tourist, and one forgot who one was. A kind of memory of one's prior existence is covered over, buried in the unconscious. It can be awakened of course, if conditions are favorable to its awakening. There are situations in which the heavenly condition transpires most effectively; for example, the light in the eyes of a baby, or the beauty of a cathedral, or the beauty of some music, or beautiful gestures of people. Something that moves us very deeply in our soul is going to awaken the celestial in us. 

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Then, as Pir-o-Murshid says, awakening requires loosening the ties of the physical world. We have to understand what that means because people often jump to conclusions and think it one has to loosen the ties in one's personal relationships with people. It's really freeing yourself from your dependence upon people and circumstances, addiction in general. Those are the ties. 

You remember Pir-o-Murshid said two things are the clues to lifting up one's consciousness. One is that passion is awakened. He says awakened because these things are in us, and they can be awakened. God awakened in us, awakening God in us. He used that word passion. It's very strong, "A passion for the unattainable." If he had said "for the Divine perfection," you might say, "well Divine perfection, I have some idea about that," but the unattainable is always further. It's like the horizon, it's always receding. The wazifa for that is  ya Badi. It means the incomparable.

We like to believe that God is the perfection of our imperfection, and we are ascribing to that level ideas which evidence the limitation of our mind. You can never say, "This is the archetype of a wazifa," because it's always further. For example, perfect mastery, or perfect joy, or perfect truth; they're always further, Badi. So that thought does draw one upward. The passion and then the incomparable nature of what is unattainable will keep on luring one upwards, and at the same time loosening the ties. He doesn't say cut the ties. It isn't the way of the sanyassin, it is the way of the dervish. This is formulated in the words of Christ, "They are in the world but not of the world." One must find some sort of independence from worldly conditions, otherwise there is no way of reaching into the heavens. Normally we identify with the infrastructure, the body, the mind, the psyche and so on; but at this point we have to identify ourselves with the subject rather than the object. That's Jabarut, the subject, Shahid, the spectator.

God is the spectator of His/Her own body, the universe. One of the clues to awakening beyond life is downplaying the infrastructure. Eventually one awakens in life and revalidates the infrastructure, seeing in it the hallmark of the divinity of God. Now Pir-o-Murshid gives a further clue. He says it is discovering your eternity or your immortality. One normally identifies oneself with the transiency of one's being; and whether one does believe in life after death or not, it's just a matter of belief. There is no assurance. So it's not in the realm of belief if you can actually identify the perreneity amidst the transience of your being. It's never the same water that flows under the bridge, yet it's always the same river. There is continuity in change. What you do is turn your consciousness away from your transience and highlight your perreneity.
	
Of course this also gives one a greater sense of what one means by God as permanent compared with the transience of the world. Together with the idea of one's immortality, there is also a sense of the impersonal dimension of one's being. That's highly emphasized by Buddha, of course, and it is also important that one understand the words of Ibn'Arabi: "Know whereby you're God and whereby you are not God." It's paradoxical in one's mind. The emphasis is on your immortality; and in your impersonality you're more what one means by God than in your transiency.

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I have an image of a rishi who is sitting on top of a mountain. People come and go; children are born, and grow up and get married, and have more children;  people get ill and then die. The rishi keeps on sitting on the top of the mountain. The one who is meditating has a sense that everything is moving but he or she has a kind of permanence, while the change is superficial. You identify with the core of your being, or the life of your life, which has a kind of permanency about it as compared with your personality that is changing all the time, or your body that is changing. Perhaps you notice that if you do that, all of a sudden you feel a enormous power in your being, because transience makes one feel very vulnerable and very fragile. Now you are discovering something about yourself that you have never actually seen before. You might have heard about it or read about it or believed it, but now you are actually experiencing it. That's called Divine power.


7.	The Archetypal Level: Lahut 
Typical Wazifa: Ya Kemal

 This about-turn in our vantage point, trying to see things from the Divine point of view, will open the way to our accessing the Lahut level of our being, where we discover the archetypes of which our idiosyncrasies are the exemplars.
Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithl) in the higher world. The forms in the higher world preserve the existence of their likeness in the lower worlds. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each form to its likeness...These are like ladders for the angels, while the meanings that descend in these tenuities are like angels.
Ibn 'Arabi
Therefore we now discover our idiosyncrasies and the potentialities of their being further deployed by grasping with our intelligence, rather than our consciousness, the archetypes of which they are the exemplars. 
Since the ephemeral being manifests the form of the eternal, it is by the contemplation of the eternal that God communicates to us the knowledge of Himself....You know yourself with another knowledge, different from that which you had when you knew your Lord by the knowledge that you had of yourself, because it is through Him that you know yourself.
Ibn'Arabi
The unfurling of the seeds of our personality, triggered off by the creative power of our imagination, at the Mithal level, would be retroactively tautological and therefore would exclude the possibility for further improvement if it were not for that extra-temporal, extra-samsaric, open ended, transcendent, archetypal matrix of our being at the Lahut level, carrying the inexhaustive possibilities of what we mean by Divinity (Ulluhiyat), just as the repetitive recycling of the seed in the plant can only be relieved by mutation.
Possible things become qualified by existence from behind the veils of the Divine attributes.
Ibn'Arabi
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Here is the breakthrough. The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man, one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
From the moment we can see things from the Divine point of view, we access dimensions of our being that transfigure our personality radically. Here lies the secret of the wazifa. This is spirituality. While serving our creativity, imagining the qualities evoked in our wazaif, as we have seen at the Mithal level, the level of creative imagination does limit the unfurling of these qualities, unless we call upon the eternal models of which the seedbed of our personality is an expression.
One must avoid looking for one's instructions in the realm of imagination...which only gives indirect indications regarding pure archetypes.
Ibn'Arabi
Here imagination is not proceeding from inwards outwards, but from upward downward. Imagination causes archetypal notions to descend into perceptible forms.
Ibn'Arabi
Our being grows to its cosmic dimensions.
When the inner nature manifested by man's inclinations and faculties has become pure, he contemplates therein whatever is of the same nature as in the cosmos.
Shahabuddin Suhrawardi



Kemal

Kemal is a quality of the threshold state which could be illustrated
by an airplane that has slowed down so much that it starts stalling.


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We participate in creating our being through our glorification, by our attunement to the sacred. We awaken sublime propensities in our being that would otherwise lie latent. We awaken the God within.
Allah al makhluk fi'l 'itiqadat: God creates Himself through your prayers.
Hadith Qudsi
 A Kemal state always corresponds with a crisis situation, when you're faced with a decision. Up to that point you were in pursuit of something, and you were putting in all the energy that you needed. Perhaps you got discouraged when you passed through a crisis situation where you lost your confidence in a project and in yourself. The way to regain confidence, if you have enough energy, is to make a fresh start. The Sufis say we're continually, recurrently reborn, so a fresh start is always there knocking on the door.

A Jelal state is, of course, positive and a Kemal state is receptive. Kemal is a quality of the threshold state which could be illustrated by an airplane that has gone so slow that it starts stalling, or a bicycle that slows down enough for it to fall, or water in a pail turned upside down; if you do it fast enough the water will not fall. The threshold state is where the water starts falling. A threshold state is a state in which one can bring about change. It is the most favorable state for a change of tack. For example, a plane that has slowed down becomes much more vulnerable to the wind, so the slightest motion of the wind is going to shift its position, whereas if it's moving, it resists that change. That's why we are very vulnerable when we are in a Kemal state. The positive side is those are the situations in which we can take a decision or plan a chapter in our life more easily than when everything is hunky dory. So it's a very desirable situation to find oneself in because the possibilities at hand are infinite. For example, if you fail in your game of chess, so you throw the thing out and make a new start. If you have a new start, you have all the pawns in your hand.

We assume what we did in the past has consequences in the present. That's what one calls conditioning or causality, which is the opposite of freedom. Spirituality is not just awakening and illumination. It is also liberation, and therefore the acquisition of freedom. If we continue doing the things we are conditioned to do in life then there is no possibility of change. We just follow a kind of routine. The whole program of the Universe offers an opportunity to open a new leaf or new chapter in our life. 

That is something highlighted by the Sufis, particularly Hujwiri in that wonderful book called Kashf al Madhjub, He was a Sufi who visited India prior to Khwaja Moinuddin Chisti. His tomb is in Lahore. He was quoting the dervishes when he said that it is the instant of time which cuts the both the guilt of the past and the prefiguration of the future.

That's saying a lot, but what it amounts to and what it implies is that there is another factor coming into our lives other than just the conditioning of Laplacian determinism. If you see the waves in the sea and you think the wave you see is the product of the previous wave, that is causality. Another factor, simultaneous with this one,  is that the whole ocean rises as each wave. This other factor, which is impromptu, spontaneous, and undetermined is a Kemal state. It's in this state that one can be creative, that is, if one emerges. 
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The Kemal state was very beautifully illustrated by Prigogine as a state of unstable equilibrium, or near unstable equilibrium wherein nothing happens. In a Kemal state nothing happens. All possibilities are latent, like the blastima the cells of a baby. All possibilities are there, and what comes through depends upon your free will. That's where you find your free will, your choice. When your choice is determined by your vow or promise, that is what has made you a knight. So the great breakthrough in your life is when you make a promise and then never go back on it. That changes your life. Otherwise the past continues to live. Sufism affirms the incentive of the individual, that is our creativity.



8.	The Unitive Level: Hahut 
Typical Wazifa: Ya Ahad

The Hahut level of our being represents a whole different stratum. It is the reality that transcends the existential state even as it manifests as our being.
When the unreality of life fades away, its reality strikes my soul.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We have risen beyond the conditions in which God can only be known by revealing Him/Herself through His/Her "signs." This requires us to identify with the existential state at different levels.
At an advanced stage one learns to grasp God as He is in Himself rather than the knowledge gleaned of Him....The one who is immersed in the vision of multiplicity is in the world in the aspect of the Divine names and the names of the world. The one who is immersed in the Divine unity is with God in the grasp of His unity, irrespective of the worlds.
Ibn 'Arabi
At this pinnacle, not only the existential state but the programming is bypassed and that means it is unaffected by the feedback from the existential realm. That is why Buddha called it not only beyond existence, but beyond nonexistence, in fact beyond conditioning. If you have a whiff of this state, you will experience the most utter freedom, in fact liberation. 
The real Being is only and exclusively God in His essence, chat and principle 'aye; not under the aspect of His names.... In the station of unity, touching upon the unity, one accesses the Supreme knowledge whereby the grasp of the qualities falls away; indeed the qualities cannot add anything to the essence.... If the names disappeared the Named One would appear.
Ibn'Arabi
Do not confuse the perfection of the manifestation through existence where the essence is individuated [like the manifestation of the totality in the parts], with the manifestation of the essence to itself, in itself and for itself.
Jami
Every time that you focus on an object, He will have already escaped you. Knowledge is a veil upon the known.
Ibn'Arabi
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One feels called upon to forego one's sense of oneself as an individual, but Hallaj points out that this would be contradictory, because one would be availing oneself of one's self to annihilate oneself. 
It is God who elects him and draws him into His state of isolation that he may participate in the mystery [of the Divine solitude].
al  Hallaj
In this ultimate step, the switchover occurs when we are no more concerned with our personality, and qualities generally, which are, according to the Sufis, the means whereby God manifests Him/Herself. Therefore it is of the domain of the Shier rather than of the wazifa.
When we are face to face, Beloved, I do not know whether to call Thee me, or me Thee. I see myself when Thou art not before me; when I see Thee my self is lost to view. I consider it is good fortune when Thou art alone with me; but when I am not there at all, I think it is the greatest blessing.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan



Ahad

Divine unity is our knowledge of God 
that God reveals to us through God's awakening

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Of course the master, the real teacher, is God. As we know, God manifests Him/Herself at first through His/Her signs (ayat), until there is a sequence whereby God, as the teacher, reveals Her/Himself or His/Her intention. So at first we are looking for ourself in an other-than-ourself. We have, maybe, rather simplistic ideas about good and bad. We're seeking an ideal in those ayat, those signs, for example, in nature, or music, or in other people. Sometimes the ideal can be embodied in a person whom we think is our ideal teacher. Actually I say we, but really it is our adapted self, that aspect of ourselves which is concerned with adapting itself to the environment or to the change in the environment that is seeking to discover itself, and also seeking for support and corroboration. One is seeking for oneself in another oneself. Actually what one is really seeking for, one doesn't yet realize. When one says it is that part of oneself that is concerned with adapting oneself to the environment, it does lead towards role playing and even wearing a mask. Yoga says we project ourselves on the environment, whether it's the physical or a social environment, or other people, or our own psyche, what the world means to us in our identity as an adapted being. 

So what does the world mean to us? What does God mean to us appearing through the ayat, through a form that comes to us from outside, whether it is nature, whether it is music, or whether it is that person whom we love? We find ourselves in a person we love in a personal relationship, or in the teacher whom we idolize and in whom we seek the ideal. At that stage we imagine a teacher. In Hinduism they have a guru, a picture of the guru, and a candle. In Sufism of course that is considered idolatry. One is seeking the appearance of God embodied in a person. One doesn't realize that for the world to teach us -- for God as the teacher to teach us -- as the world comes to us, it has to incorporate the whole scale of values that are in existence, not just the ideal. God's perfection includes all in its bounty. For the eternal principles to become actuated in the world, in the existential state, there has to be some defilement. For this reason, free will has been delegated to us, and that freedom is the greatest gift of course. The consequence is that one departs from the Divine will, and then one's personal will is alienated from the Divine will and so there is a defilement. Maybe that defilement is necessary for there to be a recycling, a renewal of life.

Then one either finds flaws in the guru, or one finds flaws in the picture that one painted yesterday of one's own life. For me, the ideal came in two opposite forms. One was the ideal model, that was Pir-o-Murshid; the other was the school. One was the feeling that I didn't like what I saw and the other was the egos of people. That was the way the Divine teacher came to me, through those children. If I had only known Pir-o-Murshid (the ideal that was 'other-than -me'), I wouldn't have known how to meet my problems in the world. 

The aspect of the teacher that doesn't correspond with what one would like the teacher to be can teach one as much as that aspect of the teacher that one idolizes. This is connected with our sense of what we should be in order to function in the world and to be able to adapt ourselves to the challenges of situations, until we realize that if we simply react to the challenge of the world, it's only the external part of ourselves, the adapted self, that is being mustered. The consequence is that one is missing out on all the resourcefulness of one's being, like a short circuit. It's only the surface of one's being that is called upon to meet the challenge of the environment. That's the reason I often play that Fourth Concerto of Beethoven to show how he is describing himself as the pianist and the world is the orchestra, and how he places a buffer between the challenge of the world and himself, so he doesn't have to react, so he can muster all the resourcefulness of his being. That's a real step. 

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I missed a link there because one is not just projecting oneself -- and that means both the good and the bad -- upon the outside world. That's the first step. The second step is that one is really ingesting the environment, the social environment. Since there is defilement in the environment, there is contamination in one as well, especially in the adapted self. Hopefully it doesn't reach right down into one's inner self, but some kind of contamination does take place. Consequently the practices we do consist in protecting ourselves against those influences which are detrimental to our being, which we feel uncomfortable about. We surround ourselves with a zone of silence and place sentinels at the doors of perception; actually not just sentinels at the doors of perception, but also within our own psyche so we are able to repel influences that we can't digest.

If we were as we would like to be, we could encompass all the good and bad in our being; but as we are now, it would give us indigestion. Therefore to start with, it's better to be selective. It is our sense of 'me' that gives us the ability to make a selection. As you know, the immune system is based upon 'me' and 'not me,'at least the first immune system. It's necessary to have a very strong sense of 'me.' If one is totally subjected to the master, as is traditionally the case, one loses a sense of 'me,' unless it's a very good master, who will strengthen you in your sense of 'me' instead of imposing his/her will upon you.

In order to have a very strong sense of 'me.' one has to not identify with that aspect of oneself that adapts itself to the environment. Rather, one seeks that aspect of oneself that adapts the environment to one's own sense of purpose. That is something which is not to be found in most esoteric schools. Actually each being is unique as God is unique, incomparable. All of a sudden you discover your real face, your real countenance. You know  'this is me.' Out there, what I see in the mirror, that's, well, the mirror is one of the cheapest and most deceptive of all feedback systems. Then, another notion of ourselves begins to emerge; then God as the master appears from within. 

The way to make this transit in Sufism is by getting into the attunement of the master. The Sufis word for this is Tawajeh. I was trained in this. When I said "my teacher is Murshid," I was instructed, "While you're doing the Dhikr, just think that you are Pir-o-Murshid, instead of idolizing Pir-o-Murshid 'out there.' Of course that makes all the difference in the way you say the Dhikr. So that's God as the teacher, coming to one in the form of what is coming through one, what is emerging within one's being from the depth of one's being. That's why one learns how to turn within. One has to downplay that outer world, the way God appears through the senses. Also one has to downplay one's identification with one's adapted self, which Sufis traditionally call the false self.

I don't like that sense that we have several selves. The adapted self is an aspect of ourselves that is concerned with adapting itself to the environment. There is another aspect of ourselves which is more real, more genuinely ourselves,'except it is something we don't quite know at first. It reveals itself to us from within. In order to be able to highlight a perspective in our being, one needs to downplay another perspective. It's like when you're looking at a hologram one way, it looks like this, and then you look at it another way and it looks different. It's really a matter of perspective. 

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Downplaying, or offsetting the focus of consciousness does require detachment, which is the way of the ascetic. What we are doing in our training is enlisting a lot of attitudes that we learned from different dedicated people. Knights, masters, saints, all these beings have some relevance to us because they are all within us. We like to project them outside as 'other-than-ourselves' in order to find ourselves. It's a principle that in favorable circumstances, dormant qualities in us emerge. They don't emerge automatically. They emerge if we create the appropriate circumstances. That's why people go to church, because they are looking for their ideal, actually, a very important aspect of themselves, which is a sense of the sacred. They are looking for it in circumstances that favor the emergence of this quality in themselves. Somehow, people are not quite clear about the difference between the adapted self and the deeper self. I think one really does project oneself into the priest and the cathedral and so on. Those are aspects of oneself that one discovers in one's adapted self because the ideal is also to be found in one's adapted self.



9.	The Level of the Overview of the Existential State: Tawhid
Typical Wazifa: Ya Mawjud

Having peered behind the curtain, back-stage of the universe, we make an about-turn into awakening in life, which we could call in Sufi terms Tawhid.

How do we awaken in life? Those veils that are the appearance of things are only veils concealing reality until one looks from behind the veils. Then we see the Divine intention and its fulfillment and realize that instead of being an illusion, or a veil, it was the drama and achievement of existence that was the objective behind all that we have encountered in our ascent through the spheres. The purpose of the blueprint of your house is your house.
The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man. And this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents the master, that is God Himself. It is in man that the Divine perfection can be seen. God knows Himself through His manifestation. Manifestation is the self of God, but a self that is limited-a self that makes His perfection known to Himself when He compares Himself with the limited self we call nature. Therefore the purpose of the whole creation is the realization that God gains by discovering His own Perfection through our imperfection.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This is the real, whereas reality was the virtuality behind the real. It remains imponderable, bewildering, enrapturing, wrapped in mystery, however much one strives to decipher it. However, if one switches over to look at real life situations from the other side of the curtain then one discovers the Divine intentions in action.
When thou perceivest, thou seest limitation openly, and thou seest Me at the back of the unseen.... And I considered the veils; and lo, they were everything that has appeared, and everything that has appeared in that which has appeared....Whoso knows the veil, is near to the unveiling.
Niffari
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This is the kind of knowledge that one can only achieve by doing rather than knowing in theory.
By actuating the Divine nature in my personality, I confer upon God a mode of existence.
Ibn'Arabi
In order to gain God consciousness, the first condition is to make God a reality, so that He no longer is an imagination.... At present there exists only in the world a belief in God; God exists in the imagination. It is such a soul which has touched upon Divine perfection that brings to earth a living God who without him would remain on in the heavens.... If there is any sign of God to be seen, it is in the God-conscious one.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
To make God a reality, we need to express the Divine manner in our personality, hence the importance of the wazaif. This is awakening in life. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points to the sudden realization that triggers off this dedication to our purpose in life.

In man is awakened that spirit whereby the whole universe was created.
True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The consequence is that, instead of losing our individuality or trying to annihilate it, we revalidate it in its uniqueness.
The soul of every individual is God, but man has a mind and a body which contains God according to the accommodation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
One is overwhelmed by the discovery that, by trying to see things from the Divine point of view, one is conferring upon God a mode of reality, hence the value of our personal contribution to the total being of God, however small.
Divinity resides in humanity. It is also the outcome of humanity.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
At this stage, we integrate our personal creativity at the Mithal level with the impersonal dimension of our creativity, attained by exemplifying the Divinity of our being at the Lahut level.
You will observe the engendering of the possibilities lying in the spiritual plane into the corporeal world. Thoughts shift from the perception of the senses to the imaginary ones; then the intelligible thoughts will descend upon you in the form of perceptions.
Ibn'Arabi
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It is typified by that state in which, seeing oneself mirrored in another, one recognizes that reality is being distorted by lenses, blurring it to the extent that one has failed to see the underlying unity, which is what one means by God.
He brought the cosmos into existence upon His own Form. Hence He is a mirror within which He sees His own Form....Thou art His Form and He is Thy spirit.
Ibn'Arabi



Mawjud

I am the mirror of Thy face. 
Through Thine own eyes, I look upon Thy countenance.
Semnani

You can't fragment the universe because each fragment carries the totality potentially in itself. You're not just a fraction of the universe, but the whole universe is potentially present within you. That's the first step - the second step is that it can be awakened. We highlighted realization in awakening beyond life, and in awakening in life we are highlighting action: transformation instead of just realization.

For the Sufis, God acquires a mode of knowledge through us that was not in the principles of His/Her being. If we get into samadhi states we get into the first mode of cognizance whereby God knows His/ Herself in the principles of His/Her being. But when we awaken in life, then we realize what is gained by God through having actuated Him/ Herself as us. The second mode is knowledge that God acquires.

At first it seemed like it was the clues that gave us access into the Divine intention. Now we see it's more than just clues. This is where the Divine principles become reality. It's quite the opposite. 
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Now these are wonderful words and thoughts, but it's much more difficult to meditate this way, rather than reaching samadhi, because we encounter a paradox. We would like to believe that we all carry the potentialities of the totality within us, even the principles, and that we're the exemplar of an archetype. However, since awakening in life does bring up a sense of our personality identity, we have a sense of our inadequacy. It is very difficult to reconcile this sense of inadequacy with our sense of the Divine perfection we believe is invested in our being. That's only our belief, and a belief is not good enough. 

Once more reconciliation of the irreconcilables challenges our minds. We have encountered, in the course of our meditations, modes of thinking that are different from the ordinary, commonplace ways of thinking. Murshid accents this very clearly when he speaks of the aristocracy of the soul together with the democracy of the ego, the greatest pride together with the greatest humility. 

These are words. Do we know how to do that? Do we know how to keep our heads high, not only when we're humiliated, but when we feel we have humiliated ourselves? Are we able to maintain our self-respect when everything tends to make us want to keep a low profile? That is the challenge. There is only one way of doing it and that is to accept that one carries within one the Divine legacy. Otherwise it's not possible. I don't know how spirituality is possible without the concept of God. There is a thought of Murshid's, that God is able to discover his perfection in our imperfection. That's a very challenging thought. I often illustrate it by the voice of Caruso that can be retrieved in its pristine glory from bad recordings. The pure voice is present within it's distortions.

If you have a low self-esteem you might think, "Yes, there is a distortion there which has occurred for several reasons. However the Divine perfection is still present within the distortion." That's why Shams-i-Tabriz says, "The man of God is a palace in a ruin." The ruins of Persepolis are, to my mind, much more beautiful than the casino at Monte Carlo. It's a palace in a ruin, yes, but it is a palace. So think of yourself as a palace in a ruin. Unless you'd prefer to think of yourself as a palace. I hope there's no offense taken, but in most of us there has been some wear and tear. I think this is so important in our awakening in life: to be able to see the perfection within its distortion, within us. It is possible to reverse the distortion in our higher self. That's where we have tremendous creative powers, at that celestial level. At the personality level, well, okay, there are flaws and we have to live with them. It's all right as long as one does not identify with that distortion. 

Now the beauty of the wazifa is that it's a language that's different from ordinary language. It's the language of symbols. Our languages are of course symbols, but these are different symbols. Their connotations are not exactly the same as our familiar languages. Therefore the signal triggers off the attunement and realization corresponding to the connotation. It's a kind of skill we're developing by the wazifa. Just repeating the wazifa won't help, but if, while repeating the wazifa, you're aware that you're triggering off an attunement and a mode of realization, then it acts as a trigger, as a catalyst. 

So here we have wazaif that are very helpful to awaken in life: ya Majid - ya Mawjud. Majid is often translated as Divine majesty, but I think it's Divine glory. The important thing is we are highlighting a value in our priority list of values. We may have encountered it perfunctorily, but now we're highlighting it. We're giving it a lot of precedence; we're focusing on it in our meditation. 
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By thinking of a quality and especially the attunement of that quality, we are awakening that quality in us. We are creating circumstances that favor the awakening of that quality. For example if you're thinking of Divine majesty or glory, that's going to awaken in you a sense of nobility, and a sense of the sacred, and a sense of values which will immediately effect your personality and give you self respect.

Al Hallaj said God projected His being as humans and then He saluted the humans, and he even congratulated them on their good looks. S/He saw Him/Herself in this being. So it's a very ingratiating thought. If we glorify God, we are responding to the act whereby God is really glorifying Him/Herself through us. That's Sufism. That's a thought that will help you to overcome your bad self esteem. As you know that is one of the problems psychotherapists have to face day after day, and month after month, and year after year, the same old story, bad self-esteem. One wallows in guilt and self-deprivation, degradation. Somehow one prides oneself in one's humility of self pride. It's much more difficult to be proud than to be humble. When one feels a little bit tittery, one doesn't feel one is quite up to that pride, but it does help one. 

Mawjud is a wonderful word. It means make God a reality. It's a word that is really controversial in Islam because you know God manifests, and of course Zahir means to manifest, but Mawjud means to become a reality, to actuate. For a lot of Moslems, that is an absolutely unacceptable thought even though it's one of the wazaif. I remember giving a talk, and a Murshid in the audience said, "The scholarly speaker has given a wonderful exposition of Sufism, but..." The 'but' was that God of course manifests, but does not become a reality in the world. That's a breakthrough. It's to be found in Sufism, but the emphasis upon it is to be found in Pir-o-Murshid's teaching. Maybe that is the message of our time, awakening in life rather than awakening beyond life.

You might say, "Why have we taken all the trouble to awaken beyond life, to achieve samadhi and now we are doing the opposite?" What we have to do is to link those two, Majid and Mawjud. Otherwise it won't work. Otherwise we're right back to where we were. There is a saying of Al Hallaj: "Oh God take away my 'I am' from between thee and me." Another is: "Take away my Nazutiat so that Thy Lahutiat will prevail." Take away my Nazat, my human nature, so Thy nature, Lahut, the archetypal level, can come through. Another way of saying it is, "I've become sclerosed in the way Thy Lahutiat has become limited in my Nahutiat. Now I could have a fresh dispensation so that Thy Lahutiat may burst forth the walls of my being, so that it may incorporate my Nazutiat, so it may incorporate more of Thy Lahutiat."

Wazaif are like a language, and their combination gives one a different mode of realization. Majid/Mawjud is an axis. Batin/Zahir is another axis, from inside to outside, manifesting, actuating. Awakening in life is actuating. A key to awakening in life is knowing by doing, instead of just knowing. A sculptor discovers his/her sculpture by making it. God is discovering by becoming us. It doesn't take away His/Her perfection. I know it sounds like metaphysics, but still it's important for us to understand what is behind what we're experiencing rather than just to jump into the experience and get spaced out in our meditation. There is a very important formula of Ibn'Arabi. He said, "By discovering the Divine consciousness as the source of my consciousness I confer upon God a mode of knowing." In other words our realization contributes towards the Divine knowing because although God knows Him/Herself in the principle of His/Her being, there's a further knowledge that is acquired through the fact that His/Her consciousness is focalized through our consciousness. 
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There are two modes of knowledge, knowledge of the heavens and knowledge of the earth. Pir-o-Murshid says wisdom is born of the encounter betweem these two modes of knowledge. In the second formula of Ibn'Arabi, he doesn't say discovering any more; he says, "By actuating the Divine nature, which is the ground of my personality, I confer upon God a mode of being."

Knowledge comes by recognizing the source of one's consciousness. Being comes through actuating it, by making it a reality, and that's the second awakening. It's not just let Thy will be done, but it's let Thy wish become my desire. I, as an individual, play a part in God becoming a reality. So if you want to know what the purpose of our life is, it's very clear. What a chance we have!

Of course, the ultimate secret is that the very configuration of our being, rendering states of consciousness corporeal, is powered not by cognizance but by Divine love. 
I emanated upon thee a force of love so that you might be fashioned according to my glance.
Qur'an
In the course of this peregrination through the stages (maqqam) the wazaif have revealed a meaningfulness that we could never have clinched in our commonplace thinking, but through our glorification became accessible At first we were assessing values, now it is being rather than meaningfulness that is revealed. It has been a journey of us in God. At first we were motivated by covetousness, then indifference, lastly interest, nostalgia, love, Ishq Allah.

Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a phenomenon of interest.
All this world that man has made, where has it come from? It has come from the power of interest. The whole creation and all that is in it are the products of the Creator's interest. But at the same time the power of indifference is a greater one still, because, although motive has a power, yet at the same time motive limits power. Yet it is motive that gives man the power to accomplish things. On the other hand, so long as a man has a longing to obtain any particular object, he cannot go further than that object.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan




Each of the different Sufi orders have an emblematic calligraphy called a "tughra" formed out of the name of their founding patron saint and often done up in the shape of something with which they identify. The words in a tughra follow the formula ya Hazrat-i, the saint's name, and the eulogistic phrase Qadusa Allah Sirrahu.
The winged heart is an old Sufi symbol from India and was chosen by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan as the seal of the Sufi Order of the West at its founding in 1910. This winged-heart tughra features "ya Hazrat-i Inayat" in the wings in mirror image (right side-out is on the left) and "Qadusa Allah Sirrahu" making up the heart.
Hazrat ("The Presence") is an honorific referring to the still-living Presence of great saints who have passed from the earth. Qadusa Allah Sirrahu means "God sanctify his Secret." There is a tradition within the Sufi way that a teacher's barakat does not become fully available until after they have become unburdened of their physical bodies. We could say that the whole phrase might poetically be translated: "Behold: the Presence of Inayat. May his message be spread."

Calligraphy and Comentary by Hafiz'u'lah Chishti


Light Upon Light



by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan






First Edition, February 1997
Second Printing, July 1997

 

The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of 
retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan between 1994 and 1996, Keeping In Touch number 81, and previous meditation courses.

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Jyoti Jessica McLachlan 
and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 


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Ambassadors of Light 

Just think that you are a visitor from the far reaches of the universe who has landed on planet Earth. You carry within you the memory of all the spheres, all the levels of reality, wide perspectives, overviews. In fact, you are a citizen of the universe, and not only the physical universe, but all levels of reality. Did your luminous intelligence become a consciousness in order to experience conditions on the planet, perhaps come to leave a mark? Or perhaps you really wanted to get a very deep look at matter, that crystallization of the thinking of the universe, in a concrete way. Having borrowed the fabric of the planet from your parents and ancestors, your memory was interrupted so you could deal with the way the universe was revealing itself to you on the planet and through the social culture. You grew up to adapt yourself to that physical and social environment, and forgot who you are. Then came a time when you felt uneasy, you felt suffocated, you felt you just couldn't accept being so encapsulated in such a very small reach.

You started looking at the stars, and you felt a great affinity with the trees, the butterflies, the sun, the animals, and the birds. Somehow you discovered all that was invested in yourself which you had forgotten. You exulted in a feeling of bewonderment. How beautiful this is, how mysterious! There must be something so incredible coming through and all I grasp is just the surface of things. I suspect there is something coming through and I get into the consciousness of the trees, the birds and even of the sun and of the stars. I feel a nostalgia, and I feel the consciousness awakening. The whole universe now seems to be a revelation of the Divine secret. I exult in such ecstasy because what I discover is a million times more wonderful than what I'd ever thought. Yes, I can see suffering, but it seems to be the price we pay for all this glory, and I see how it pulls me to my personal self. The wonder that is coming through to my celestial intelligence is so overwhelming that no price is too great to pay.

 The One Being 

Somehow I'm beginning to suspect that it is really One Being. I thought I saw trees, animals, flowers, stars, and the sun, but really I'm beginning to feel, to sense the One Being behind it. 
The wonderful thing is that the soul already knows to some extent that there is something behind the veil, that there is something to be sought for in the higher spheres.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now I'm really absolutely shattered in this discovery because then I'm part of this One Being. How can it be? I thought of myself as me, but the evidence of that discovery becomes so overwhelming that I exult in even more glorification. What a privilege to share in the experience of that One Being discovering Him/Her self as me. 
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There is everything around me, all those beings. I find that the more I glorify, the more I manifest that Being, and the more uplifted I am beyond my commonplace personal emotions. I can see the luminous intelligence, the intelligence that investigates like x-rays, working through me, awakening me. Suddenly I find this universe I thought I was observing is not only the stupendous manifestation of the unknown secret, but that it is awakening as I awaken. It is awakening to the reality it manifests. I see that awakening in the dance of the atoms and the choreography of the stars and galaxies, in the unfurling of a flower, and in the struggle for self-esteem in those who have been broken by life and are floundering in despair. I see it in myself. It's like listening to the clarion call, "Awake!" 

The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man. And this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents the master, that is, God Himself.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now I discover something in me, qualities in me that are trying to awaken, that are clamoring to awaken, and they require my attention. They require my support. It's like the whole universe awakening as me and as you and as them. I meet beings who are much more awake than I am and they tell me to awaken. It is God who is awakening as me; do not think that I am awakening. I need to spend some time withdrawing from the clamor of the world and ponder upon the meaning of myself, the meaning of life, and the meaning of God. 

These seem to be just mental constructs and I've been warned against them. I see they're a trap and so I fend them off. I'm trying to dismiss these random thoughts; they're too incisive, too insidious. Somehow it is my ecstasy that saves me from the inroads of those thoughts and I see they're a part of my conditioning that takes away my freedom. I need to be free from all those things that limit me and my understanding, and my emotion, so that powerful reality behind my being can surface and erupt. It's so powerful. All I have to do is recognize it and it immediately erupts, overwhelming my whole being and shattering all my assumptions. Then I discover the very same power that I assume created me at the moment of my conception, or even my birth, and I see that it is still working. It keeps on rebirthing me anew. It's like the power of the Divine ecstasy that materialized this physical universe. 

 Unconditional Love 

I realize that it is the power of love, in the most unconditional form it could ever assume. The Divine magnanimity is not just desiring to be known, but desiring to confer the same plethora of His/Her treasures to all the fragments of Him/Her self that proliferate out of a sheer act of magnanimity. Even wishing to become better than Him/Herself was the futurity and the springhead behind the live being that He/She is now in the universe. The desire is to be concrete so that which is coming through may be shared. It needs to be concretized into a plethora of forms which He/She displaces, revealing the secret treasure invested in each of the fragments of Him/Herself. 
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I have the privilege to be one of those fragments, and His/Her love and magnanimity also create that. What is more, He/She wished to invest me and all those fragments of Him/Herself with the gifts of freedom, and with the gifts of knowing and of will. In so doing, His/Her act of love led Him/Her into the hands of those wills that alienate themselves from the global will. 

I see the drama, and the cruelty, the ignorance, the vanity, the greed, the grossness, the vulgarity, and the decadence. Imagine that love should culminate into those excesses with the result that the misuse of that love should culminate in that abuse. I see humans destroying themselves out of despair for having lost contact with the reality of their own being, like a system working within itself out of hatred, despondency. I see the rescue operation of those who share that compassion and in whom the Divine magnanimity has responded by acts of compassion. That's much more important than awakening; it is the ultimate expression of awakening. The issue is not the waking of consciousness; it is the awakening of conscience. That's not the awakening of the mind; it's the awakening of the emotion of the heart. 

I can see God fragmenting Him/Herself, descending from the solitude of peace, out of love for the possibility of me, and of you, and of the stars, and of the atoms. Suddenly I discover myself in my role as a knight, and the chivalry of those who are dedicated to service, rather than seeking awakening and enlightenment for myself. I see that withdrawing from life is the supreme egotism in order to obtain something for oneself. 

Now once more I see that luminous intelligence looking into the heart of matter, into the suffering in matter itself, into the drama, and carrying with it all the impressions of the heavenly spheres as the ultimate medicine against suffering, like angels of mercy. Then I realize it is Divine love that is motivating my desire to be of service, but that those who are in despair need to want to be helped. Somehow they need to feel free to help themselves in a safe situation when all I can give them is my love.
Love in its fullness is an inexpressible power which speaks louder than words; there is nothing man is too weak to do when it gushes forth from his heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The ability of the universe to restore itself, the ability of each atom to provide for itself its own healing, the ability of the psyche to reorganize itself in a way that will elude some of the misgivings that cause disturbance right up into the soul, can only be unleashed by the strength of unconditional love. 

 Spiritual Power 

The work, the investiture of the knight is to protect the victims of the manipulation and greed of humans and counter those who are wreaking suffering upon other beings. Once again I call upon the Divine investiture in my being, the investiture of power, not just insight but in spiritual power. 
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That's why the knighthood is an investiture all the way down through the hierarchy of beings who form the spiritual government of the world. When one acts in the name of the governance of the universe, rather than one's own personal incentive, one feels endowed with spiritual power. It's a power that makes miracles happen, makes the most unbelievable things come true. This power makes one's dreams come true and brings heaven on earth. It does not happen without the incentive of those who have dedicated themselves, consecrated themselves to act as emissaries of that governance. Behind it all I feel the One and Only Being, upholding those fragments of Him/Her Self that are stumbling, by trying to build in them the awareness that His/Her perfection is to be found in their imperfection. Each one of us is the fulfillment of the very purpose of that One and Only Being. That One and Only Being becomes perfected within our own imperfection. 

Of course I realize that alienating myself for one instant from that overall quest of the totality knocking at the door of each fragment of itself, the slightest alienation from that supreme power that is working through each and every being, such alienation has an immediate effect of causing suffering to others. When there is an ignorant person in the post of the judge, there is a victim on the scaffold. That ignorance is born out of alienating oneself from not just the wish of the totality but the consciousness of the totality, the emotion and the thinking of the totality. Now I realize it is suffering that acts as the catalyst of awakening, not one's own suffering alone, but the suffering of the victims of ignorance. It beckons upon one to awaken in one's understanding and in one's love; to awaken to the drama before our own eyes. 

Awakening to the drama requires us to see how the cosmic celebration is working its way in that very drama. There is beauty in the forlorn and those who have been broken by life. There's awakening in despair. The yearning for freedom is aroused by different strains of one's own ignorance, one's ignorance of one's own freedom. It's very much like the chick trying to crack the shell of the egg which is constraining it. Some may find freedom. I can see that suffering is due to the constraint upon one's freedom; not just bodily freedom but circumstantial freedom. One yearns for freedom from one's mind, from the compellingness of thoughts that become obsessive, from the passion of emotions that become so overwhelming that one has lost the ability to find peace. One yearns for freedom from one's greed, freedom from one's self-image, from thinking of oneself as an individual instead of honoring the Divine reality in one's being. One yearns for freedom from the despair born of ignorance.
The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes. It is free by nature, and looks for freedom during its captivity. All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Page 5
 Our Purpose 

Now I see myself descending from the spheres, not just to discover conditions of the planet Earth, not just to awaken, but to play my part in the drama as a knight in warfare. I realize the only weapons that are not counter-productive are the lances of light that dispel the darkness and touch upon a very deep nostalgia. Deep thoughts are buried in people's souls, buried under numberless veils, but there is a nostalgia for light. Misdeeds can only take place in the darkness. As soon as the light emerges, those with darkest intent try to seek shelter and hide from the advancing power of light. 

I realize that part of my awakening and understanding and fulfilling my task requires of me to awaken the light, even in my very body, and become luminous, because that's the weapon that dispels the bad intent and abuse. 

There is a new ecstasy coming now, ecstasy not just in discovering the marvel of the universe, but discovering the light of my own being. I am awakening it by discovering it. I am also discovering the light in the beings of other people. By communing with that light we reinforce each others' light in mutual recognition. I now see that the physical world is actually an outburst of light. By alienating oneself from the source, one's light has been dimmed or covered. I see that the light of intelligence one easily lost sight of is not only awakening the light of my body, and your body, but is the very light of our bodies. That light of intelligence is right down in the atoms, and is the very power that moves the atoms and the cells in our bodies. 

Now I see the universe as a great festival of light that, as it advances, dispels the darkness. I want to be part of that advance of light. That's why you are here, so that we may together participate in that advance of the dawning of the light of the universe. This is the crusade of light.

Page 6

Being a Being of Light

When we initiate someone into the Sufi Order, we say, "That you may find the path that leads you towards the purpose of your life, illumination." Ours is a way of light. The task at hand is to become conscious of being a being of light and to make it real. 

I remember one day I was looking for a rishi in a cave above Rishikesh. There was a group of people, and someone said, "Yes, there he is, up there." All I could see was an enormous white light. I looked again and on the top of the hill I thought I saw a light somewhere in space. I noticed there was a man in the middle of this light, and he had a beautiful white aura. It was so beautiful to be in his presence. 

One can work with light, just like a potter can work with clay. How wonderful it would be if we were totally luminous and radiant. We would have a wonderful effect upon people around us. As soon as one faces a person who has a lot of light in them, it brings out one's own light. While you're having a conversation with a person, you could just be conscious of being a being of light. It does something to you right away. The person to whom you are speaking is also a being of light, and that's what establishes the communication. That means you have to be strong enough to see the light aspect of that person even though it doesn't come through. That person may be very materialistic, manifest hatred and ugly thoughts in what he/she says or thinks, yet you maintain the awareness of the light, the light of the soul. 
There is a light within every soul; it only needs the clouds that overshadow it to be broken, for it to beam forth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I'm sure you want to belong to the tribe of people who bring light wherever they go. Our beings are a million times more beautiful, diaphanous, translucent, radiant than they usually appear. Our representation of our body is totally inadequate, and the same thing is true of the starry sky. We think the sky is studded with stars, but in fact it is a whole symphony of light. Every bit of space between the stars is filled with light. There are cosmic rays well beyond the range of our vision. The important thing is that the reality behind what we think of as physical reality is a reality of light at all levels, not just the level that can be measured by scientific instruments, but at the level of the mind, the emotions, and particularly the level of consciousness, intelligence.

 We Are What We See 

Our meditation can start with a vision of the heavens as a world of light from which we derive our bodies, our minds, our intelligence. Just imagine you have descended from a world of light, and behind it the sun of the whole universe, Nur-al-Anwar, the whole hierarchy of beings of light. This world is not just light, but beings of light. Everything is beings: planets, molecules, atoms, electrons, galaxies. There is no such thing as inanimate matter.
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As one evolves, one naturally ceases to look down on earth, but looks up to the heavens. If one seeks the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now we have this vision of worlds of light, a whole hierarchy, and ourselves derived from it, emanating from it, descended from it into the narrow constraint of our self-image. Having lost the sense of our real being, we are like the prisoners chained in the cave of Plato. The people outside would say, "The sky is blue, the grass is green," and they would say, "I don't know what you mean by 'blue,' 'green."' All they could see were shadows. 

We have to break our chains, the chains in our way of thinking. That is the breakthrough which allows the memory of those worlds to come back. It is the moment where you can dance with joy, and say, "Yes, I know what I am now, I am a being of light, I have always been a being of light. How could I have forgotten that is the world I belong to?" 

That light is interfusing this world; it is not just up there. It may be found in the photons of a beer can, in the eyes of a child, sometimes in the eyes of a person who is about to die. It is the memory of worlds of light.

One wishes to bring the light into focus, so it may become a reality on the physical plane. That is existentiating, becoming aware of one's aura. I recommend a practice to do when you are walking in nature. Be aware of the light of your being. Maybe you can't see it, but physically it can be ascertained in a laboratory. Be aware of the light emitted from the sparkling cells of your body. Be aware of the light emitted from your hands as you touch the leaf of a tree or a flower, and of the light around your head which is more intense than any other part of the body. Nerve tissue is much more radiant than muscle or bone tissue, so all that accumulation of cells at the top of the head causes a tremendous amount of light. 

Shahabuddin Surawardi says that after their initiation, those who have been invited to the temples of light don robes or mantels of light. Your aura is your initiatic robe. It radiates far and wide and lights up the environment. When you come into a room you are aware of the light of your being that brings sunshine into the room.
Let Thy sun shine in my heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The extraordinary thing is that while the aura appears like a tremendous interplay of rainbows, there is an effigy of light inherent in your aura. The thinking of your soul has sculptured the light of the spheres into a effigy of light. It doesn't have a boundary. It doesn't have the consistency of matter. 
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Still, there is a structure that reflects your awareness and your degree of love and dedication and capacity for glorification. Each one is unique and all the faces are His face, as the Qur'an says. The Divine Face is trying to come through your face right down into matter, and on the way it is an effigy of light.

Just imagine going through life without knowing one's real being, carrying a mask and looking in the mirror and being convinced one is what one sees in the mirror. That is the state of most of us. The miracle of life is structuring something that does not have form to start with: pure intelligence, love, nostalgia, dedication, glorification. There are no forms, but somehow the formless manifests in music as a form, or in your being as a form. That is the miracle of life. How is it that your thoughts should be expressed in words? How is it possible that the motion of your vocal cords should communicate thought from person to person? How is the ballerina able to communicate her attunement to the crowds?

That effigy is evanescent, elusive. It changes according to your mood, according to your thoughts, according to your attunement. The core of it is sublime, and then there is a defilement, a deterioration; the colors of the aura become blurred or dark brown, grey or black. If you are aware of the influence of thoughts on the aura then you have wonderful feedback. You can test it and see how an untoward thought will immediately alter the colors of your aura.

 Healing with Light 

The light of awareness can give you power, because it manifests as truth, and truth is the greatest source of power. With this awareness, you can cure yourself. The cells of your body are sparkling, emitting light; they are continually regenerating, being replaced, or replacing themselves. The intensification of the light of the aura will cause your cells to regenerate and proliferate faster. That is healing with light. You can infuse the light of your awareness and direct the light of your aura into the cells of your body, just like casting a flashlight beam in a dark room. It is not totally dark because everything is sparkling, but you give it extra light. That light infuses your body, giving you vitality. 

You can also thrust all the power of that light upon your problems. The light of your being will correct the misassessment of your consciousness. Your consciousness will now be able to grasp what your intelligence is seeing, just like one has a hunch about something and then corroborates it by using one's consciousness.

Remember that light is revealed and reveals. It is not the light that is seen, it is the light that sees. It is not only revealing; it is creative because it unleashes the latencies in all it encounters. It is like an illusion that is dissipated by a light, like a cloudy image you think you see at dawn and then as the light gets stronger that image is dissipated by the clarity of the light that dawns upon it.

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Focalization of Light 

Let's begin working with light. It is true one has to visualize light. You might wonder if you are just imagining instead of really experiencing light. It has been ascertained in laboratories using photoelectric cells, that if one concentrates on the light emitted by the body, called bioluminescence, the body does indeed radiate more light. Knowing that, I hope you feel confident that we aren't just imagining things. We really do something in our minds, which has very tangible consequences in terms of our body. For example, imagine that you discover you have great power in your being. You might think you don't have power, but somehow the power of imagination is such that, given favorable circumstances, virtual qualities in our being emerge. They are awakened exactly as a seed starts unfurling in a favorable environment. So what we want to do is to create that environment, and what is more, that environment includes not only circumstances, but our realization, our endeavor or discipline, and of course our emotional attunement. 
A sparkling soul flashes through the eyes.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
To begin with, imagine that your eyes emit two beams of light, just like the head lamps of a car. Now it is true that the eyes do emit light, but by concentrating upon them you'll increase enormously the effulgence of your eyes. You'll also find that people pick it up. Most people of course love light and will react by feeling more luminous themselves. You're establishing a communication with people in terms of light. As you see, it's a very simple practice and I suggest doing it every day. 

One can take further steps. I find it helpful to imagine sky like I saw once above Chamonix, above La Blanc after a terrible storm at night. In the early morning about four o'clock, the clouds offered a display of the most wondrous hues of all different colors of red and orange, green, yellow, gray, and even black, violet and rose. It was quite incredible, and the scene kept on shifting. Sometimes I could see one cloud and transparency behind the other one. Then I could see the glorious globe of the sun rising in this array of colors. I thought to myself, "This is the world I belong to, I'm in exile on the planet." That's just a metaphor of course, but all of a sudden you are discovering your being by your communication with light, or discovering the fact that at least one dimension of your being is light. In order to discover it, it's wonderful to either experience it or imagine it. 

I remember a statue in San Francisco of a Chinese monk who has a vision of such beauty. You can't see his vision of course, but you can see it on his face. His whole face is transformed by that vision. Just imagine how a human being can be totally transfigured by a vision of splendor. What are we doing in life? Sufficing ourselves with nitty gritty, very trite commonplace, when we are offered the glory of the heavens? This way you are really imagining an aspect of a being which maybe does not have a form, but just impending splendor. 
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You're projecting it into forms that call for all the power of your glance. Your being is almost carried into that landscape of the soul and totally transformed by it. Notice that somehow the mind itself is involved in this transforming experience.

Become aware of your whole aura. I hope imagination is going to reach a point when it is really experience, but of course we are at the edge of our normal experience. Can you feel it? It's more like feeling than seeing. Can you feel light around your shoulders and upper arms, even in front of your chest? I know one can imagine it. Walter Chappell made photographs of flowers in ultraviolet light. One can see the corona around the profile of the plants. It's very clear that our bodies are rather like those of flowers and our skin, the profile of our body, is surrounded by what they call a corona, a light such as in Kirlian photography. It's helpful to have seen these pictures and then try and imagine the same thing is happening to you. I find it very interesting to turn my body left and right. One has a feeling the aura is turning to the left and turning to the right, but this is a feeling. 

I went to the laboratory of Dr. Mutayama in Tokyo. He has a cell, and within it are photoelectric cells. If you're a good meditator you can emit enough photons so the whole system lights up. You sit there and you really try to emit a lot of light. It's amazing that if you really try, and one needs to be used to working with the aura, at a certain moment the whole solar system lights up. You've triggered off the threshold situation. 

 Identifying With Your Body 

Let's identify with the body, how you feel your body. Remember how you feel when you sunbathe? I think one really does open the pores of one's skin to be receptive to the light of the sun. You don't have to do this in the sun, you can do it in a dark room. It's an availability of the cells to be receptive to light. The fact is the cells of the body absorb light, so it's not just your skin. The atoms avail themselves of the energy of light, because light is energy. They are transformed by it. Electrons feed on light and consequently they begin to free themselves from the constriction of an extremely narrow programming and start jumping their orbitals. They jump from one to the next, and overcome the constraint they are in when they don't have enough energy. The surplus of energy gives them this freedom. When they have expended all this energy they fall back to where they were. Any excess of energy is radiated and that accounts for your aura. In the meantime, you can say that the atoms, molecules, even the cells are jiggling, sparkling in a state of effervescence, dancing. 
The galaxies are a little form on the shoreless sea. We came whirling out of nothingness. The stars dance and form a circle, and in the middle we dance. The atoms are perplexed in their choreography. And it is all God, turning around Himself. 
Jelaluddin Rumi
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When you're sitting there meditating, you may think you're immobile, but everything is jiggling inside your body. You can intensify that ebullience by becoming aware of it, or even just sensing it a little bit even though it's not very clear. Just having a vague sense of awakening all this energy within your cells enhances it. What happens actually is that when the cells avail themselves of more energy from the environment, they start dividing, which is called mitosis, the process of reproduction and renewal. It's a wonderful therapy in the body. You're really promoting the growth of your cells simply by the power of imagination. It's very tangible, very effective.

As the sunshine from without lightens the whole world, so the sunshine from within, if it were raised up would illuminate the whole life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

I even find it useful to study the configuration of cells; you can look it up in a book on biology or physiology. You can descend into this wonderful world of basic living structures that are continually renewing themselves. This is the real infrastructure of your consciousness, the way your consciousness awakens out of this deep infrastructure in your body so you are really involving your body in the awakening of your consciousness. It's good to imagine that you're absorbing light as you inhale, and as you exhale you are consciously radiating light.

As you know, the photons travel through space at 186,000 miles a second. Can you imagine? Of course one can't imagine. So instead of thinking that your body is surrounded by a corona of light, try thinking that the light of the photons of your body are shooting out through outer space, and maybe bombarding the stars, and forming with the stars what is called a wave interference pattern. We think the skin is the boundary of the body, but light is considered by scientists to be matter. Consequently, our bodies extend into the starry sky. Can you imagine that you're out there, and you're here, you're here and out there at the same time? Of course it just blows one's mind. 

We could just take one step further and understand that the body is a hard core within that template which is our aura. Our body is a crystallization of light and in turn, that crystal absorbs light. It's a way of looking at one's body in terms of the light of the universe. It's part of the big bang, a breakthrough of light. If you were to make a space walk, which will be available to people one day, and you were to do these meditations while you were out there in outer space, you could think, "Oh I'm looking at these stars, it's wonderful how they look from this vantage point and how planet Earth looks." However, if you identify with the aura of your body, the stars are not the objects of your cognizance, of your observation. Your aura is the convergence of the light of the stars. Your aura boomerangs the light of the stars back into the wave interference pattern of the stars, the light of that ocean of the universe, the ocean of light. This is a vision that will fill you with delight and give you a totally different sense of yourself than the rather commonplace notion we have of our bodies and our situations in the markets of the world. It's like discovering the cosmic dimension of your being instead of identifying with the personal dimension. It's like we're multidimensional beings.

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, the soul naturally begins to see in itself the being of the spirit.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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 Identifying with Your Aura 

The next step is to identify with your aura instead of your body. Instead of thinking, "My body absorbs light from the universe and radiates light," you think of the body as a hard core within the template. As you identify with your body, you'll notice that it pulses as you inhale and exhale. Your aura doesn't have boundaries, so it's like a vortex, a whirlpool within the ocean of light of the universe. In the whirlpool there is a centrifugal motion and a centripetal one. The energy builds up towards the axis of the vortex as you inhale. You can feel the energy flowing into your aura, like pumping the tire of a car. The pressure is increased in a smaller space, and then the other way around. You see an expansion of the aura as you exhale, although the aura does not have a boundary. It's a wonderful feeling. It's like the ebb and flow of the tides of light and the starry universe and you're part of it, a kind of dedication to light. The consequence is you're going to become a much more luminous being. 

There is a further step. Physics provides us with a model for what we are experiencing that is much more precise than anything one could have thought out normally. The universe such as we experience it is just one of two perspectives, actually of several. We can talk about these two for now. Dr. David Bohm calls these perspectives the implicate state as compared with the explicate state. Imagine a lake with lotus flowers or water lilies on the surface. This is the explicate state. If you swim under the surface you see a network. Instead of just judging things according to their appearance at the surface of life, you can look at things from the backstage of the universe. You see that everything is connected. The water lilies or lotus flowers are really different expressions of that one network of roots behind it all. That's what Dr. David Bohm calls the implicate state. He says the world is unfolding, in trees or whatever, as discrete entities. 

That's the explicate perspective that we can understand; the universe broken up into categories, discrete entities. Another way of looking at things, which is rather paradoxical, is to see the world as waves. Waves don't have boundaries and they form a wave interference pattern; they compose together, intersperse. If you turn within, then it is enfolded, everything interspersed with everything else. The consequence is you are able to see the context instead of just the discrete elements. Everything we experience as discrete entities at the surface is interspersed with everything else in the depth. This is the implicate state of the universe. This is the fundamental state, and the explicate is just a derived state. We can't conceive that, so we are more comfortable in the perspective where we see everything as discrete objects.
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Now let's translate this in terms of light. We usually think of light as something that radiates from a source of light, the sun, a candle, an electric light. There is definitely a source of light and that source is definitely located in a particular point in space. It's very difficult for us to imagine infused light, what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls all-pervading light. The light waves intersperse other light waves, a basic condition of light. He points out that we look in the sky and see what we think of as the stars, but in fact what we see is the overall way the universe is converged in one point in space among the other points in space, and we call that a star. We can do the same thing with our selves. We can converge the inner light, or the all-pervading light and radiate it forth as our aura. 

Your aura is not just the radiance that we boomerang back from the environment. We absorb and then we emit light. It's not the same thing as reflecting light. A further dispensation of light is availed to us by turning within; then when we exhale and radiate our aura, we're not just boomeranging back the light we absorbed from the environment. We are also radiating light that we converged from the inner light, or the all-pervading light, or the infused light at a kind of subliminal level of reality, like a white hole in outer space for example.

There are several ways of doing it. One is to hold your breath after inhaling and before you exhale. Concentrate upon the solar plexus. Imagine that the solar plexus is like the center of a whirlpool, a vortex. The matter of the universe, and in fact the light, gets converged into it from outside, the outer light, the explicate gets converged, drained down into that black hole. Then the opposite occurs; the solar plexus acts as a white hole so that new energy emerges from the center of the vortex. New energy is converged at a subliminal level and then it starts radiating from your heart. Is that clear? The solar plexus acts as a black hole at the end of your inhaling. Then your hold your breath. At the end of your holding your breath, before you exhale, the solar plexus avers itself to be a white hole instead of a black hole and new light energy emerges and is radiated from your heart chakra. I find it useful to become aware of the outgoing radiance of your heart. The heart chakra, which is at the center of the chest, is really like the center of your aura. Think of yourself as a sun and your heart is like the core of the sun. 
Let my heart reflect Thy light, O Lord, as in a pool of water the sun is reflected.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now maybe we could simplify this practice. I think of the words of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan who says, "If your breath finds an obstacle in the way of its expanding into the outer world, it will turn within." The same is true with light. In the first practice we absorbed light from outside then we converged it. We absorbed light as we inhaled light from outside. Now what we could do is simply imagine we placed sentinels at the doors of perception, raised some kind of barrier. Consequently, we breath in from inside instead of from outside. It's a whole new way of breathing. We're absorbing light from inside, and converging it; it becomes centered. Exhale and radiate it forth. 
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Another practice would be as you inhale try to transfer your attention from one chakra to the next. I hope you know what chakras are. Let's say they're the plexuses of your autonomic nervous system starting from the bottom of your spine. You transfer your attention from one center to the other as you inhale. Think of them as stations within your spinal cord. One end is actually the pituitary gland, which is considered to be the center from which the crown center radiates. Now do the opposite as you exhale. Be aware of your aura. At first it's a bit vague, like having a lot of light around you. I've already drawn your attention to the fact that there is light in the cells. It's not just surrounding your skin. If you become more sensitive, you'll realize there are different frequencies of light, not just colorless diamond-like light. Be aware that the color of your aura changes with your mood. If you're angry it would be red, if you were in an very innocent state, it would be light blue, and so on. We don't know it all so these are things we need to explore. The colors seem to be rather random, at least at first. We experience them as colors, but in fact what we're talking about is just frequencies of light. 

Another very wonderful practice is to alter the frequency of your aura in accordance with the spectrum of light by the power of imagination. As you inhale, imagine red at the bottom of the spine, ultraviolet at the top, gold in the heart, orange at the solar plexus, green at the throat center, blue in the eyes, and sort of vermilion in the second chakra. There you have a whole beautiful array of frequencies of light. If you ascribe one of these colors to each of the centers by the power of your imagination, it will have the effect of bringing your aura into a very harmonious condition, and will have a lot of consequences. You'll become very calm and very powerful, very centered. You'll overcome all the randomness of your thoughts jiggling here and there. It will give you a sense of being absolutely in tune with the universe. It's like when a harpsichord is beautifully tuned, one feels that in some coherent way it is connected with the symphony of the spheres. 
When the soul is attuned to God, every action becomes music.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When you hold your breath, make a quantum leap into a whole different level of light. It's not the inner light you absorb from the universe; it's another type of light. The Sufis call it the light of intelligence. Think of your intelligence as a light that is cast upon things, and think of your glance as a light you cast upon things. That's why we started working with the glance. Normally our eyes are instruments of perception. They're passive, receptive to the light of the environment. Our eyes also do emit light, but mainly it's the other way around; they are absorbing light. If you think of your eyes as being those two beams of light that I described, you might think you have the faculty of thrusting the light of your understanding upon situations. In fact, if you understand situations, there has to be some matching between the circumstances and your understanding. 
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There is an understanding prior to experience, which in philosophy is called protocritic, prior to our interpretation of things. For example, how do you know a table is round? Roundness is written in your intelligence. You come across something that is already present in your intelligence and then you recognize it. Otherwise, you'd never be able to know the difference between a square and a circle. This sense of the light of the intelligence will enhance your need to develop your intuition, your insight. It's not based upon experience. 

Let's continue the last practice. As you exhale, review the chakras as you move in descending order. Think of the light of intelligence as a catalyst that sparks the latent light in each chakra as it descends. See it just like a Christmas tree with all the bulbs attached to a cable, but have the light progress one to the other instead of all lighting up at the same time. Now this is a very wonderful experience. For me it's a step in preparation for a very important objective in my life, and that is awakening and illumination. It's also important because it establishes some kind of connection between mind and body, the light of intelligence, the light of the aura. I like to illustrate by thinking of a scene in which the mother shows the child a puzzle and says, "Do you see that little pixie in the tree?" And the child says, "No Mummy, I don't see it." "Look again." "No, no I really don't see it." "Look again." "Yes!" All of a sudden the whole face of that child lights up. If you measured it in a laboratory, you'd see the whole aura of that child suddenly start sparkling. So think that the light of intelligence sparks the light of the aura. That is exactly what is meant by the saying in the Qur'an that we often refer to, a light upon a light.

 The Fire Breath 

Now we have baptism with fire. Of course it's drastic. Unless we have that element in us we are rather spineless and amorphous. Fire gives us pep, a surging energy that flares up, for example into outrage rather than rage. One is outraged by terrible dishonesty and cruelty of people, or of oneself. It's that capacity which will help us to correct ourselves. It's easier to judge others, but if we do this practice of seeing ourselves through the eyes of another, we get outraged by our own actions. The outrage seems to have an all-consuming effect upon us, purifying by consumption. 
The same light which is fire on Earth and the sun in the sky, is God in heaven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Inhale through the mouth and inhale through the nose. Breathing through the mouth has a much more traumatic effect upon one than breathing through the nose because it involves the throat chakra, the thyroid gland and the parathyroid. It involves our rate of combustion, our rate of burning, our rate of involvement and commitment. The key to this is Haqq, the truth; truth is the key to fire. One will not brook the slightest departure from absolute truth. Of course the consequence is light as a result of the consumption of matter by fire. If you try to concentrate upon light it won't work because there's something we need to do with ourselves before we can bring out the light in our being that is covered. 
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When you inhale, the fire draws the air into itself in order to burn. Inhale through the mouth and imagine a flame in the center of your spinal cord being aroused and reaching upwards, like a dormant snake awakening. This image is often associated with Kundalini practices. There is a sense of a flame that shifts from the infrared to the ultraviolet. As you go towards the top of your spine you experience a much cooler light than the warm fiery light that is infrared and incandescent. At the bottom of the body, there's a feeling of heat. Feel that incandescence at the bottom of the spine and then the very high frequency light; blue at the level of the eyes, violet above the crown center and then ultraviolet beyond. 

You experience a cooling as you proceed up the spine so one of the best ways of getting into the kind of consciousness that promotes the radiation of very high frequency light is to get into the same state as when we experience pure spirit; snow and ice and the immaculate state. There's a feeling of great coolness, even coldness at the top of the head. The consumption of impurities at the lower levels seem to enhance the radiance at the higher levels. 
As the sunshine from without lightens the whole world, so the sunshine from within if it were raised would illuminate the whole life, in spite of all seeming wrongs and limitations.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 The Consciousness of a Crystal 

Imagine your body is a crystal. That's tantamount to experiencing yourself as being transparent or translucent. You know within the molecules of ones body there are spaces, and those spaces are enormous in comparison to the size of the atoms. The picture of a crystal is very appropriate. What makes the crystal become a perfect instrument for light to pass through it is that the molecules are aligned according to certain geometrical patterns. They all pulse at the same frequency, and consequently the optimal position in which they can be packed is orderly; it can hold more in it. 

If you could get into the consciousness of every molecule of a crystal, you would find they have a way of relating to the other molecules in a state of resonance. They are locked into a cosmic harmony. Insomuch as there is any personal consciousness in a molecule or in an atom within a molecule, or within the electron within the atoms, it is expressing harmony far beyond its own volition. It's the cosmic harmony, and it's simply fitting into the resonance and going on pulsing without any variation in time and space. It's as if time and space have been suspended. The overall consciousness is more important than the personal consciousness. In this case, there is very little personal consciousness and the overall consciousness can come out more strongly in its participation in the symphony of the spheres. 

Try to get into the consciousness of a crystal. Experience that wonderful readiness to oscillate at the frequency in which it is supposed to oscillate by the conjunction of forces. Because of that, the crystal lends itself to the rays of the sunburst of light through it. You experience what it's like to be so much in sync with the cosmic harmony that you also become an instrument of the light of the universe. You feel yourself totally clear, luminescent and effulgent. 
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Can you really get yourself into the consciousness of the crystal? It's truly at the sacrifice of freedom, initiative, complexity, variety, and fluctuations from sclerosed order. If the crystal is subjected to the energy of light, some of the electrons may tear themselves away from that sclerosed order and fluctuate. When they have run out of energy, they have to fall back again into their orbitals and at that time they radiate light. They had been activated by light and now they themselves radiate the surplus light. Now, in their consciousness, can you experience that moment of glory when the electron is able to force itself from that sclerosed order and the joy of giving off light as it falls back into place again? Our bodies are like that! They are partly crystals. 

We do something to the nervous tissue in our body by experiencing ourselves as a crystal. The molecules of the proteins of our nervous cells align themselves because they are what is called aphasic liquid crystals. Nervous tissue has the same property as a crystal, except it can he stretched. The crystal is rather static; it's vibrating all the time, but it has a very definite sclerosis and structure. 

Imagine now what you're doing to your body by concentrating on a crystal. Your whole body, even the molecules of your flesh are getting themselves ordered in such a way as to become favorable to the passage of light through you. The photons flow from the nervous tissue toward the outside, and from outside toward the nervous tissue. Your aura burns much brighter. You become an instrument of light.  

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Awakening and Illumination

There is something about light that causes the heart to beat faster and exalts our soul. Actually what we are doing is awakening. The words awakening and illumination are sometimes used alternately and it's important to be very clear about their meaning. The fact is they go together. The more awake one is the more light one radiates in one's glance and in one's aura.

One of the more tangible features of a state of illumination is that one is absolutely radiant. One's presence fills the room with light. 

This goes together with a state of acute awareness on all levels, perspicacity, alacrity, insight, intuition. It also goes together with all the shadows which take away our light, which cause resentment and hatred, dishonesty, lasciviousness, or any kind of psychic uncleanliness. To become more radiant, we need to work at all levels of our being, the physical, thoughts, emotions.

 Levels of Being 

At the physical level, practices of visualizing light enhance the radiation of photons from our bodies. The cells of our body are continually proliferating in the process of mitosis. Every time a cell divides there is a tremendous outbreak of light.

When you look at a flower, a tree or even a blade of grass, it is fluorescing light, not just reflecting the light of the sun. In the same way, our own flesh, the very electrons of the body, are being transmuted into photons. The electrons free themselves from their orbits and begin to dance the dance of Shiva. When they expend all their energy and return to their earlier state, any energy that remains is fluoresced as light. They are continually absorbing light from the sun and then giving out that light in the form of fluorescence. The other thing that is happening is that your body is burning. It is in a state of combustion, giving out infrared rays in the form of heat, but also light of all different frequencies.


The physical visualization will help, but there is a deeper work to do, to clarify the mirror of the soul as the Sufis say. If one isn't totally honest, the thoughts become confused, ambiguous. So there is work to do in meditation in order to make the thoughts luminous.
The mind is a world, a world that one makes and in which one will make one's life in the hereafter as a spider lives in the web it has woven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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The Tibetans work with the colors of the aura to transmute the rather gross energy of infrared light into ultraviolet frequencies. Instead of the colors of the aura being random, as they are most of the time, they start ordering themselves in a sequence rather like a rainbow. Above the head is a whole array where all the colors are repeated again. Of course, it is much more complex than this. There are beautiful colors of light beyond the visible range, frequencies which we don't interpret as colors but which are incredibly beautiful. In this method, as you inhale you are particularly conscious of giving order to the colors of your aura. Then as you hold your breath, let yourself be moved by the symphony of light at all levels, and that includes the ultimate level, the light of intelligence. 

The moment of illumination comes with this awakening, when you see your real being as a light of intelligence that casts its light on all things and makes all things clear. Then you see that all the different bodies of light which have accrued to that pristine core of your being are like a support system, the lamp that protects the light.

When you exhale you might experience the miracle where the intensity of your awareness of your awakening brightens your aura. One could say the light of intelligence enhances the light of the aura. It's just like when you grasp something that you hadn't understood before. Suddenly there is a smile, an outburst of energy, and there is a breakthrough of light. Your whole aura burns all of a sudden with a brighter flame because of the intensity of your awareness, a light upon a light. The light of your awareness (what the early Christian church fathers like Gregory of Nissa called the uncreated light) impacts the created light we understand as photons.

Awakening triggers off illumination. It's good to see the relationship between awakening and illumination, and that would be ya Alim - ya Nur, or ya Nur - ya Alim. Awakening is always in some way connected with light. It's not an intellectual thing; it has to do with not only the radiance of your aura but also luminous thoughts. You experience a kind of clarity in your thoughts that overcomes ambiguity because light brings out the edges of things and makes everything clear. 
Our thoughts have prepared us for the happiness or unhappiness we experience. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Your thoughts become crystal clear instead of nebulous. I use the phrase, "entertaining luminous thoughts." I don't even think one can project this picture unless it is motivated and supported by a very beautiful emotion. Need I say just how different it is from dark emotions, resentment, or betraying someone, or hatred, deceiving someone, manipulating someone for one's good, greed and so on? Something of the angelic dimension of your being emerges when called for. When circumstances are favorable these aspects of your being are going to emerge. If you keep on repeating this over a period of time, your personality will be transformed because you bring into your personality elements that otherwise would have been simply buried.
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You don't have to try to figure out what is happening with your thoughts. It won't just happen automatically, but it's a nice idea to think of the difference between thoughts when they become crystal clear and when they are nebulous. When there is even the slightest inclination to deceive someone, one's thoughts become nebulous. They're not clear. You can clarify thoughts by confronting them with the power of truth. They become crystalline, clearly outlined, not blurred or nebulous. You become a very clear person and your dealings with people and with problems become clear. 
Heaven and hell are manifestations of agreeable and disagreeable thought.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I imagine thoughts being like the sparkling of the aura. You have a certain core in the aura that somewhat has the countenance of your face or your heart. An effervescence seems to sparkle at the jagged ends, which is the way thoughts are translated in the fabric of light of your aura. Sometimes those thoughts are explosive, like fireworks. Other times they are rather dull and repetitive. Your whole aura is involved in a process. It gives you feedback. Sometimes these formations are harmonious and congruent and at other times they are random and almost disruptive. So you have a wonderful feedback system there, but you see that depends on your own sense of aesthetics. In fact, the clue to the celestial spheres is in the nature of one's emotion.

We want to make our emotions luminous. I am not using metaphor when I say that emotions can be luminous. When a person expresses a generous thought, a generous emotion, a generous gesture, the person smiles. When the face smiles, physiologically the body bums more brightly. It fluoresces, emitting more light than ever. One says in science that the cells are in an excited state; the cells of the body experience ecstasy. The ecstasy of the psyche is communicated to one's body. Therefore, one's emotional attunement is a prerequisite for being illuminated.
The light which comes from the soul, rises through the heart and manifests outwardly in one's smile, is indeed the light from heaven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Unconditional love is a good example of an emotion that is luminous, compared with the dark emotions of hatred, anger and jealousy. All such emotions are represented in Christianity as The Fall. There is no doubt about it; there is a fall. A kind of moral gravity draws us from the sublime into the vulgar. If one wishes to attain a sense of fulfillment in one's life, one needs to overcome that gravitational pull by working with oneself to clarify that whole area which is murky and dusky, and which tends to cloud the clarity of one's soul.

Through emotions you can reach the plane of pure splendor. Begin by imagining something beautiful. It could be a beautiful object, a beautiful gesture, or a beautiful thought. Music is helpful because there is no form. You've got to make that quantum leap beyond the tangible, and it is the attunement of your emotion that will trigger off that leap. However, there's a limit to visualization. 
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You can only take the next step if you are so caught up in the image of beauty you are shattered to the core of your being, so you don't know whether you are crying or laughing, it is so beautiful. If one is shaken in one's emotion, the heart is affected with its joy and its pain. The door to the emotion of the soul is the emotion of the heart.

The next step is the "ah ha" moment when all of a sudden you grasp the Divine intention, not the programming; the intention is beyond the programming. You grasp beingness. I don't want to say the being of God; that is a projection. You grasp that all is one being. You don't reduce a being to its body; it is the mind, the emotion, the presence, the attunement, the intention. Consciously, that sudden click of intelligence triggers off an outburst of light, a clarity of awakening.
The soul has manifested in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of existence and yet be aware not to lose its way, but regain its freedom in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
There is a breakthrough of light right down to your aura, light that reaches right into the stars. The stars are beings, not little bits of light in the sky; they are beings of light. While the photons of your aura are bombarding the stars, your being is connecting with the beings of the archangels of the stars. There is communication at all levels. There is light upon light, and life communicating life to life, and the ecstasy of creation, and you are part of that wonder.  

 Modes of Light 

The most important dimension of light is the light of intelligence. There is the light we absorb from the environment; in a sense we ingest light from the universe and emit that light in our aura. There's another mode of light which emerges from within, a new dispensation, the all-pervading light. It's not from without, it's from within. 

There's another quality of light which is non-physical light. When you identify with that type of light you realize that you were a being of light prior to your birth; your aura's not just the light that you've absorbed from the environment. There is an interaction between those different lights, leading you to further levels. There's the level of celestial light, and then there's the light of intelligence.
We're like a star that is able to converge the diffused light of the universe and then beam it out in one direction. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Our wazaif  do not reflect these different aspects of light. The word is a catalyst, but it's up to you to be clear as to what aspect of light you are aware of or working with at the time. I'm pointing to the importance of the relationship between ya Nur and ya Munawwir. Say your aura is Munawwir. Your aura is the lamp, and Nur is the light of intelligence. 
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The light of intelligence seems to awaken or enhance the light of the lamp. That's the meaning of the phrase in the Qur'an, "a light upon a light." So if you say ya Nur - ya Munawwir, you're aware that your perspicacity affects your aura and makes you more radiant.

We have this wonderful wazifa combination that works with the configuration of your subtle bodies in order for you to have a feedback system. It gives you a sense of yourself; you can see yourself mirrored in that image. That plays a very important part in Sufism. 
Your soul projects its form in an image whereby it gives you a sense of the nature of your soul. 
Ibn' Arabi 
It's a process of reflection that is creativity. Creativity is always translating a thought or an emotion into a form. Even though you know the form is just a means, a clue, it acts as a feedback system. So that would be the wonderful combination of ya Munawwir - ya Musawwir. This is because Musawwir means the sculptor, the fashioner and Munawwir the lamp. The lamp that is your aura is being confectioned in the form that expresses the nature of your soul, so you discover yourself through these projections. Now, it's not a one-to-one situation because one could say one's soul carries an infinitely wider range of bounty than our psyche and so those projections that manifest as images are changing all the time. Some of the techniques used are to imagine landscapes, some of the Sufis call them landscapes of the soul in which you discover aspects of yourself.

 The Mirroring Effect 

While you're in the first stage of working with the aura you are breathing in and out and so you tend to just think of the aura as a collection of light. While you're fluctuating you might be able to grasp the contours of your aura. It doesn't have a profile but it resembles your face and your body, particularly the arms and shoulders and so on. You could look in the mirror and just think of someone who has done you much harm and you see the expression on your face. Now think to yourself, "I can forgive that person," and see the expression on your face. The mirror is the cheapest feedback system in the world. You see it right away, right there in front of you, there's no doubt about it. You can work with any wazifa, like Haqq, (truth) or Rahim (compassion) and see what happens to your glance, to the expression in your eyes.

Once you've done that, turn within to what is called the subtle body. The word we use is Latif. Subtle would be like steam instead of rocks, for example. Two clouds merge whereas rocks will collide. It gives you a very harmonious sense of merging as a being of light with other beings of light and mirroring beings of light and so on. It's a wonderful sense of communing with light. Then you get this extraordinary mirroring effect. You see how people react to your light or your darkness and how you react to the light or the darkness of people. So this is as a network of connectiveness, like the roots of the water lilies under the surface of the water, but in terms of light now. You can do exactly what we did previously, but without looking in the physical mirror. One has a kind of sense of the countenance of one's aura and it's a much better feedback system than the physical mirror.
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At first this is a feedback system; it gives you a sense of how your thoughts affect the configuration of your aura. Then we come to that point which is a very important breakthrough in meditation. That's what one calls fashioning, or making the states of consciousness corporeal. You can fashion your subtle body. You become like a sculptor who is able to fashion your body of light. Even a sculptor can only do it if his/her hands follow his/her esthetic sense. It has to reflect one's attunement. So that means your state of consciousness in meditation is going to actually configure your subtle body of light. It not only serves as a feedback system but as a means of making one's realization concrete so it becomes reality. That's the meaning of Mawjud.

We come to a very challenging thought; it's quite incredible. You know the Hindu theory of maya. To get to samadhi you have to be unaware of the physical world and even unaware of your thoughts or your personality and gradually you overcome the existential conditioning of which you are, and awaken beyond the beyond. That's Yoga. According to Sufism, the world is not maya, rather it is constituted by signs, devices, clues. From our point of view, let's say on this side of the veil, that's what the physical world is, what all the situations are. From the other side of the veil is how God becomes reality. The device becomes the objective. It's a very surprising about-turn of one's way of thinking. 
He is the knower and also that through which He knows. 
Ibn 'Arabi
You might think, "that through which He knows" is just the instrument, but ultimately, that is the objective because that's how the knowledge becomes configured in its support system. The purpose of a blueprint is the house. If that is so, then you see the importance of participating in translating spiritual experience or attunement into the configuration of one's own body and subtle bodies. The Tibetans carry that out very, very intensely. They concentrate on a statue to such an extent that when they walk in the street they think they are that statue that is walking; they are totally impersonated in that statue. It's like an actor who's able to get so much into the role that he/she becomes that role.

 Attunement 

The Sufis do not concentrate on the form because if you do that the fashioning of your bodies is stereotyped. It is reflecting a statue; it is not really you. What the Sufis are doing is to indeed configure the attunement of a wazifa, but in our own unique way, so each one of us is able to be totally ourselves. The consequence is we do not, for example, sit with a photo of our guru in front of us like in a Hindu ashram, but get into the attunement of a master so we are able to see things in a way we wouldn't have seen otherwise. Somehow we can configure the image of ourselves that was triggered off by getting into the consciousness of the master. In other words, we are able to see how the master sees us and then we configure ourselves according to the form that we have discovered when looking at ourselves through the eyes of the master. That is a very, very powerful method. In fact, that is the method that makes a Murshid.
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I remember in my early training in Hyderabad in India sitting at the tomb of the grand Murshid of Murshid, that is the Murshid of the Murshid of Murshid, and I was being led by the grandson of that Murshid. At first I said, "No, my teacher is Murshid, so I don't want to concentrate on you." He said, "Oh no, no, I'm just there to communicate the traditions of the Sufis but you must concentrate on your father." So I just imagined Murshid in front of me when I was repeating the Dhikr. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! That's Tassawari Murshid, that's a picture of Murshid. That is limiting. No. You have to get into the consciousness of Murshid. Imagine that you are Murshid repeating the Dhikr. That makes all the difference."

We can get into the consciousness of a master, saint, or prophet, man or woman, and see things from their point of view. In fact, we can get into the attunement and see ourselves from their point of view. Somehow that attunement is really in resonance with our own attunement, but our own attunement is perhaps latent and theirs is active and so it will awaken that attunement in us just by resonance. When two harps or a harp and a piano are in the same room and they are tuned to the same pitch, the chords of one will resonate with the other.
Unveil Thy face, Beloved, that I may behold Thy glorious vision.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Visualize your real eternal celestial countenance which is hidden behind your physical face. Your physical face is a distortion of that real countenance, the core of your being that is not concerned with adapting itself to the environment. We tend to think of it as more stable and permanent than our personality or even our face that changes. Every person's expression changes according to his/her mood. The effigy, the celestial self or countenance also changes according to our attunement. 

This is a practice I recommend you do when you are working with wazaif. Try and represent to yourself, with your physical face, the total attunement to a particular wazifa. For example, if the wazifa is ya Wali, (mastery), how would you look if you were really in charge of whatever it is you are doing; skiing, hang gliding, driving a car, conducting an orchestra? Your upper lip stiffens up a little bit and there's kind of a consistency in your expression that bespeaks that quality, that attunement. Now think of a person who is suffering, who's just had an accident or is ill, or a beautiful person who suffers terribly or has just received really bad news, or a child that is distressed. The expression on your face is not going to be the same as when you are in charge and controlling the situation. It will be very different. 

Let's look at it another way. A thought comes into your mind impromptu. You could just stop everything and see how it affects the expression of your face. Watch yourself in the mirror. You would see a very clear picture of how your thought has altered the expression of your face. Once you do that you know how the physical form reflects the attunement and one's realization.
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The expression on your face is one thing. There's also the countenance of your aura and the many other levels of our being. In order to be able to identify with that celestial counterpart, you have to give up resorting to reactionary emotions, attitudes, and thoughts. One could say at that level the aura is extremely sensitive. It suffers so much from the grossness of the world. It doesn't get damaged because the core of one's celestial being is immaculate, but it is covered over, distorted. It's really affected by the spillover from the world and one's own emotions. Suffering is there for a sensitive soul. It's like throwing mud on the snow.

Try to sense not just your physical face, but the countenance of your inner self. I find it helpful to imagine that your celestial self, your eternal or real self, whatever it is that you call self, is molded in the fabric of light that it is your aura. You could even start by thinking of the physical aura. One of the features of the aura is that it definitely has a configuration, instead of being just the intensity of a photon count. This internal light has a configuration that matches your attunement and your realization. As you are thinking of a wazifa, like ya Wali for example, you try to feel, really to sense the configuration. It's not the light of that inner light. After all, the inner light is very diffused. Rather, it is the way the inner light takes shape into an outer light, a light that can be seen. You're really fashioning your body of light as a sculptor would do, but on the strength of the attunement of the wazifa rather than in a fanciful way. It's much more solid. There's no end to this. For the Sufis this is your celestial counterpart.

That image is changing all the time and so you have access to an extraordinarily rich, bountiful pool of resourcefulness. When you come into the battle of life, you are coming from this deep place. Power comes from within. Insight comes from within. Now it's very wonderful to do all three wazifas: ya Nur, ya Munawwir, ya Musawwir. You can see all these qualities being awakened by the fact that you are trying to fashion them into images. It's like if you're composing or painting or being creative, you're awakening latencies in your being, making them conscious so that you may apply them in your work of art. 

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Dimensions of Our Being

Our conception of physical light is typical of a cross section of the universe that we perceive we are able to live in. For example, some insects can only perceive two dimensions. 'Their world is like a sheet of paper. They can only conceive of a cross section of a three-dimensional world. They would be quite absolutely convinced that the world is the way they are experiencing it. 

Let us not confine ourselves to the limitation of our mental representation of the universe which is associated with our senses, with our programming as a human being. We are invited to reach beyond the limits of our existential humanness by meditation. Let us not remain stuck in that very narrow perspective. If you think that way, then your body is one of the dimensions of your multidimensional being, or one of the layers of your multi-tiered being. It's not just your body that's absorbing light, but your aura. At every level of your being there is a convergence of the light of the universe at all levels. The opposite of course is effulgence, radiance. When we see our aura as a cross section of this total reality, a little bit more falls within the purview of our understanding. 

Identifying with our physical body gives us a very limited sense of identity. As we move beyond that, the sense of our boundaries and the ocean of light that is the universe is totally altered. Now that we can't think of ourselves as having boundaries and radiating beyond those boundaries, we might think of ourselves much more like a vortex, a whirlpool that would like to keep on pulsing. You could think there is some kind of fluctuation in the whirlpool so it alternates between the onrush of water toward the center, and the way the water flows out towards the periphery and gets filled in from within. If you do that, it alters totally your sense of being the subject experiencing the universe. You discover yourself as being the universe discovering itself as you. That is exactly what Sufism is about. It's looking at things from the antipodal standpoint from your own standpoint. It's discovering that what you thought was you is really the being of God who is discovering Him/Herself in every manifestation or expression of His/Her being. 
The soul is light, the mind is light, and the body is light--light of different grades; and it is this relation which connects man with the planets and stars.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Light does not radiate from a center, from a source in a definite location in space. Everything is interspersed with everything else. That is what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan means by the all-pervading light. He says the aura is something like the light we perceive from a star. The star is able to converge the light of the universe. I think he means the all-pervading universe and then radiate it forth. So think of yourself as converging this inner light, not the outer light. Then radiate it forth as outer light, as your aura. 
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Now the clue to this is to be found in a totally novel form of breathing. When we breathe we are used to thinking that we are drawing in the oxygen. We are actually drawing in the energy of the universe, and then sending it out. Try this new way of breathing. As you breathe in, just think you are drawing energy from a subliminal world, subjacent to our physical world. Think of the physical world we are familiar with as being a cross section of a multidimensional world. It's something like a white hole. A new energy is emerging in this cross section of the universe from the totality of the universe. See how it feels. As you exhale you could expand this life-giving energy, so your breath is no more. You're not simply boomeranging back the energy that you converged from the environment; you are a transducer converting an all-pervading type of energy into a type of energy that can be handled and made use of at the physical level. Of course there is no doubt that in order to do that you have to have practiced turning within.

When you exhale you do the same thing. Pir-o-Murshid says to imagine there is a barrier between your inner self and your outer self so you cannot radiate the energy outward as you exhale. Somehow it replenishes your inner being. I must admit I don't quite understand how this works because your inner being is so co-extensive with the inner world, but if you do it you will find that you develop a kind of inner power. When you start recontacting the outer world you feel as though you are a lamp that is illuminating all things. In your practices you can turn your body to the left and to the right. Feel as though the light of that lamp is turning to the right or to the left as you turn your body. I think of the picture of Christ where his heart is a lamp, and he's protecting his lamp against the storm. It's just that kind of feeling you have. Your heart is like a lamp and you're meeting the outer world armed with the inner power that you could visualize as the light of this lamp. It gives you some kind of asset in dealing with the outer world. Otherwise, one is subjected to the impact, the challenge of the outer world. 

 Levels of Light 

Now we may start working with different levels of light. I often use the word transcendental dimensional light. We are of course not talking about anything that makes any sense in physics, but physics has limited itself by its own programming. Perhaps you could try concentrating very intensely on landscapes of light. Start with something more tangible, like for example a beautiful scene of a dome in the high mountains with clouds of various colors. That is just a starting point. At a further point you are so carried away by the splendor coming through. The beauty there, the expression of splendor, is beyond form. Somehow that splendor enlists your ecstasy. It brings you very close to what we imagine the heavens to be like.
When I see Thy glorious vision, I am moved to ecstasy, Beloved: waves rise in my heart, and my heart turns into the sea. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
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Of course it may be imagination, but one can't imagine something that does not have some foundation. We can distort it, but behind it is a reality. We're trying to reproduce in our imagination something of which we have an intuition in the depth of our being. It starts with this sense of the way the Divine  splendor becomes perceptible to us through the medium of physical matter, where physical matter seems transparent, where it allows something to come through which seems rather different from the kind of thing we imagine the physical world to be. It's like having a profile. You have one sense when you see the definite profile of the tree, and a very different sense where you don't have a profile, like clouds interspersing for example. That kind of envisioning carries you beyond the commonplace representation of the physical universe into what one might call a transfigured universe. 

For example, if you could see the corona of the flowers you would feel you were beginning to look into a transfigured universe. Hildegard von Bingen says she finds herself absolutely enthralled by a world of light. She is totally in that world of light and that light permeates her being. One is downplaying consciousness of one's body, or at least what one imagines one's body to be like. One is also downplaying one's  thoughts. Then the act of one's creative imagination is so overwhelming that one is carried in it beyond what we call the physical world. She says this world of light opens up, like a gate that opens up into a further world of light even more magnificent and overwhelming and her ecstasy is heightened even beyond where it was before. Instead of thinking of it as a gate that opens up, I think it's like seeing in transparency something beneath the layer. There's one layer after the other. 

Shift your perspective so now you pick up something that was hidden behind your first perspective. You could almost espy it, because there's some kind of transparency. Now shift your perspective just like you shift your perspective looking at a cube drawn on a blackboard. Look at it one way, then the other. It is your bewonderment that helps you shift your perspective, to downplay a previous perspective and highlight another one. As you do that you can have a feeling of deja vu, a sense that this is familiar but you had lost sight of it. It's like recalling your state prior to your conception and birth. At least that's what you thinks; in fact, it's as though you function at several levels. 

One of those levels is what we call the celestial level. We're still functioning at that level but it's much easier to think that one remembers the condition prior to the formation of one's body. In fact, one is functioning at several levels at the same time. One isn't always aware of that happening at those higher levels because one is caught up in the physical world. It's all a matter of perspective. 
The soul has manifested in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of existence and yet be aware not to lose its way, but regain its freedom in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
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So it's really like discovering levels of oneself that had fallen out of perspective. Those levels seem to have a perinity, a much lengthier perinity than the transiency of one's physical body or even one's physical aura. One is touching upon eternity. You could stay in that state without wavering. Of course it embodies one's ideal and one loses one's faith in that ideal because one is conditioned by the nitty gritty, dealing with the challenges of everyday life. Let's say the support system takes over. One loses a sense of all those things that are meaningful to one, forgetting to be kind to one's soul.

I recommend a practice Buddha did under the tree. Close your eyes and imagine you are looking at a red disk. Shift your consciousness in such a way that all of a sudden you really see a green disk. That's the reflex. Concentrate on the green disk, then you see an orange one. That is the reflex of the reflex. Shift again and you see a violet one. Work on this until you're able to shift your consciousness in such a way that you offset it from its previous setting. It's not just shifting the focus of your consciousness, you are shifting your sense of identity. They both affect one another.

Buddha is simply imagining diamond-like, colorless, yet physical light. Try it out and see. Do it until you are absolutely flooded with this light. You shift your consciousness, and you begin to visualize the reflex of that physical light and then you reach into a further level of light and so on. You keep on moving, shifting and the light is a million fold brighter and more magnificent. So instead of saying there are different levels of reality, as in metaphysics. You have a sense of what we mean by levels although your mind doesn't understand. 

You are discovering a world of light and the starry sky is only an inadequate expression of the whole array of spheres of light. Somehow you're experiencing levels of reality. 
The one who lives in his mind is conscious of his mind; the one who lives in his soul is conscious of his soul.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This experience is related with one's ability to grasp beyond the usual outreach of the mind, which is one's notion of realization. For example, suppose you were to look at the stars in the sky every morning while the sun came up, and you kept on trying to see how long you could look. There's a change in the time the sun rises of course, but if you account for that change you will develop your perspicacity to grasp the stars when the sun is in the sky. You sense worlds of light and eventually you see your participation in them. You start with your physical aura, then the next level is the aura of non-physical light of your being. The next one is even less physical light. There is a countenance for each of these levels. God is continually revealing Him/Herself to us through all those devices, and this means is more overwhelming than any other. You are totally overwhelmed when you discover the countenance of your celestial being. 
 Wherever I look is the face of God.       
													Qur'an
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This is what I'm talking about when I talk about the celestial spheres; otherwise it's a concept. I'm trying to sense what that means to us in terms of self-discovery. Otherwise, we ask silly questions like where is heaven? Is it out there? Is it Venus or Jupiter? That's because we're so used to always thinking in terms of location in space. Here we have departed from our identification with our bodies because somehow in our minds our bodies are located in space and time and change with time. Some of our thinking about time and space is connected with what the body does. The thinking of an athlete is certainly within the framework of time/space. The thinking of a philosopher, for example, does not involve space in any way because it does not involve matter. Space and time are only meaningful with regard to matter. 

When we shift our identity from identifying with our body, we discover levels of our being in which space is totally irrelevant and that's why we have a sense that we're not inveigled in space or time. We discover what Pir-o-Murshid calls the deathlessness of our being, that part of our being that is not subject to the process of becoming, a sense of eternity. We get messages from the physical plane but now we have this kind of overview. We don't have to shunt back into the physical level, although we can get messages from the Earth plane. It's as though we were in outer space and people on planet Earth were sending us messages. Our bodies send those messages to our higher self telling us that the body is uncomfortable. The random thoughts that bug us when we try to meditate are in some way connected with bodiness, with our sense of the physical world or that kind of perspective that we normally get into.

 The Light That Sees 

All those kind of impressions tend to pull one down. One of the ways of resisting is to consider that they represent a very limited perspective. Here our perspective is from a sense of freedom, not curtailed by the limitation of the usual sense of identity. This kind of attunement of our consciousness leads towards visions of the galaxies. You find the words of Jelaluddin Rumi, about the atoms and the shoreless sea, and the galaxies, and the dance, and God who dances in the middle of this choreography. These are visions that give us a sense of awakening from the limitation of the commonplace vantage point into a kind of cosmic vision of the universe, with ourselves as part of it. We're not like a fraction of it, but so much a part of it that we can't really tell the difference between the observer and the observed. 

If you can make that step, then you see this vision of light is just the way we project that aspect of our self that is Nur into forms other than ourselves. You realize that all of a sudden you're highlighting the subject rather than the object, the observer rather than the observed. You get a totally different sense of light, not what the Sufis call the light that can be seen, but the light that sees.

The Light of Intelligence

This practice leads us to another level of our being into a further realization, and that is what the Sufis call Nur-al-Anwar, the light of intelligence that projects its light on all things. We make a quantum leap into a whole different way of looking at things. 
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The trouble is we're so used to thinking of our individual self, that it takes a further step to realize the light of intelligence cannot be fragmented. The consciousness of the universe is polarized, or focalized, in each one of our consciousness. Intelligence cannot be fragmented that way, and therefore it is really what we understand by Divine  intelligence. 
I think as God thinks. 
																				Newton
It isn't just wishful thinking. We realize if a human being has any sense of how the universe works, it's because we think the way the universe thinks, in a limited way, but still in the same manner in a holistic way. That is the moment of illumination when one identifies with the light of Divine  intelligence. That is awakening beyond life in a kind of samadhi of life. 

Now there is just one more step, to awaken in life instead of beyond life. That is to enlist the impact of the light of intelligence upon our aura, light upon a light. All of a sudden a breakthrough of realization triggers off an explosion of light in our aura. 

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The Light Behind the Veil

If you confine yourself to the personal vantage point, your understanding gets in the way of seeing a different meaning. Consider your problems or situations as clues that lead toward what the clue is really about. You have to grasp the universe trying to reveal its meaningfulness. For example, if you follow the pug marks of a bear, chances are you might find the bear. That's called Tawhid in Sufism. You start with a clue, then move from the clue to the reality which is as the clue. That reality does not have any form, nor is it limited in time and space. Something else transpires behind that which appears. 

 Changing Your Vantage Point 

When you think of your problem, the facts usually are what appears and that's the way you tend to see the problem. Something else is transpiring which cannot be figured out with your mind. You have to alter your consciousness to see it. 

Focus on the light radiating around your body and identify yourself with your aura. Don't just be aware of a zone of light around you, but really identify with it. The body is like a hot coal within the aura. Now concentrate on the light in your glance. There is a lot of light in your brain which has been threaded through the optical nerves. This light reaches out into space through your eyes like two spotlights. At the same time the light of your heart center is just like a miniature sun and it is radiating as your aura.

Concentrate on those two beams of light with your eyes closed. Now open your eyelids just for a flicker of a second and notice that the objects in the room force your eyes into focus, but don't lose your concentration on those two beams of light. Keep concentrating on the very power of your glance. Open your eyes again and you don't see the objects, they're like a blur. Keep concentrating on the glance. 

Now close your eyes and imagine a flower. As you exhale you're in your body consciousness and you're conscious of the light of the glance. You are conscious of casting that light upon the flower. See the flower such as it is with a profile. Now as you inhale, switch your focus. Identify with your aura. Toggle between identifying with your body as you exhale, Nazut in Sufism, and identifying with your aura as you inhale, Arwah. It's just like with a hologram. You can see it one way and then you can switch something in your glance and you see  another slice of the hologram. As you switch you turn within and identify with your aura. Now switch and imagine the petals of the flower are surrounded with a corona, like in Kirlian photography. That corona does not have a profile, it's just radiance. You could consider this second perspective to be seeing that which transpires behind that which appears. It's like the countenance of the face transpiring through the face. 
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Now imagine you are walking in a very beautiful landscape in nature. Identify with your subtle body or with your aura as you are walking. All of a sudden it's as though you switched something on and you find the forest is transfigured. The trees and flowers are luminous; everything is light. The trees are no longer the objects of your perception. They are live beings; while you are looking at them they are looking at you. 

We are ready for the next step. Think of a problem, perhaps the most difficult problem in your life. It might be a problem with another person or with matter, for example if you're a carpenter or a mechanic. Most problems though are about relationships with people. You're in your ordinary consciousness and you see the facts. Now inhale and switch as we did with the flower; switch back and try to see the drama that seems to be coming through that problem. That problem is just the way it appears in your ordinary consciousness. As you switch into that inner attunement you see the problem in its context. There are far-reaching implications. The problem is like a wave in the sea and behind that wave is a whole sea. 

You have to shift the setting of your consciousness so you don't judge things by their appearance. You suspect and espy a meaningfulness which your ordinary mind cannot grasp, but which your inner mind at the level of Arwah is able to grasp irrespective of the personal vantage point. For example, you see the relationship of the sun and the moon without reference to the planet Earth. There's an eclipse of the sun and moon in every point of space at every moment, but its just significant to us on the planet. You see there are ways of thinking differently. We think that  astronauts are traveling in outer space, but the planet is in outer space. Its just a matter of changing the way we think. 

Let's get back to the flower again. We said in the transfigured state you see the aura of a flower. That would be if your vantage point is interfacing with the flower. If the vantage point is within the flower instead of your looking at the flower from a distance, your consciousness is in the flower. You can almost see how the harmony that is virtual in the universe is behind the flower configuring itself into those petals. You can see it from inside now, almost as if you were able to enter into the unconscious of that flower. 

Now let's do this with our problem. Instead of viewing the problem from your vantage point, imagine now that you do the same thing as you did with the flower. You really enter into that problem so you're not looking at it from the personal vantage point. Your consciousness is homologous, of the same nature as the programming inside that flower, and inside that problem. Your view of the problem is not limited by your vantage point, but is totally merged into the meaningfulness that is coming through that problem. 

There is a measure of freedom and a measure of constraint in that problem. For example, you use a word and there's a range of meaning. If that word meant everything then there would be no language. So for your words to be meaningful there has to be a constraint and a range of freedom. 

Enter into the problem from within and you see that for it to be meaningful there has to be some kind of constraint in the problem and that is compensated by the meaningfulness, like your language is enhanced by the constraint in your words. The consequence is that things don't happen as we would like them to happen, but there is beauty in the way the meaningfulness in the problem emerges out of its very constraint. 
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First we were seeing things from the Nazut point of view, then we're seeing things from the Arwah point of view. Now we're going to see things from the Mithal point of view and see what impact you have on the problem. 

 Transformational Creativity 

The problem isn't just there irrespective of you. Your handling of the problem affects the problem. You can't just consider the problem per se as it is. In order to test your understanding of the problem, imagine you've changed your way of handling that problem. How would it affect the problem? 

Suppose you work with somebody you don't like and you go to that person and say, "Look, I think we need to talk because quite honestly there is something about you that I have a problem with. I don't want to be detrimental. I don't want to blame you for it. Maybe it's something in me. Anyway, I feel it's not good for us to go on like this and I hope you don't mind if I just open my heart and tell you there is something that makes my relationship with you very difficult. It would be wonderful if we could overcome that."
To step forward is going forward in the path of friendship, and to step backward is going backward.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Of course it takes courage because you're afraid that person might become angry and  slam the door in your face or whatever. You're taking a risk. I'm not telling you that's what you should do, but suppose in your meditation you imagine you are taking a different approach in dealing with this problem than the one you've been taking so far. How does it affect the problem? 

Be aware of the idiosyncrasies of your being. Perhaps you're a rather trusting person and you are often deceived, or you're a fearful person and consequently you find it difficult to involve yourself or commit yourself. You could have a melancholic disposition and find it difficult to be joyous, or you suffered in your childhood from owning up, and consequently you do not always tell the truth because you're afraid of being punished. You could be a very truthful person, candid, and the consequence is that you step on people's corns and always cause rows. These are examples of idiosyncrasies. 

Now see how these idiosyncrasies affect your problems. People perceive these things and adjust themselves accordingly. They could think, "I can't trust this person." The consequence could be you don't get a job for example. They could think, "This person is insecure, so I wouldn't like to find myself in a situation where the uncertainty of this person is going to affect my life." Perhaps you're an irate person so the people you're involved with are afraid of opening up with you, so there is no real communication. Our idiosyncrasies affect our problems. 
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Your self-image has the effect of a sclerosis in your personality, your idiosyncrasies. Change doesn't occur because you identify with them. You go through your life like that, without progressing. What a wasted opportunity! Instead of thinking of yourself as static, think of yourself as dynamic, progressing, evolving. It's as though you were flowing from inside and  moving the emerging qualities like the fresh petals from inside the flower, pushing the jaded idiosyncrasies out of the way. They're being dispersed. 

This is Mithal. The creativity of your being affects and transforms your problems and your relationships with the people involved. That is what the problem is about. The secret of creativity is retrocausality, the effect of vision of the future upon the present. You might call it wishful thinking, but if you imagine how you could be, then it encourages the flow of new dispositions in our being and that will eventually transform your relationships with people. Of course there is some resistance. People have made a picture of you based upon the picture you had of yourself, and they are holding you to it. You might find you need to talk with the person and say, "Look, we've got to sit down and talk this over because you know both of us are not what we used to be. We've changed. I'm a new person, you're a new person. Now I think I know how you've changed, but you know it better than I do. And the same way, perhaps you don't know how I've changed, but I think you need to know because then we can communicate much better." 
The heart of man is a temple; when its door is closed to man, it is also closed to God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The setting of your consciousness and the sense of difference in your identity you found when inhaling and identifying with your aura is going to help you now because the usual vision of the world is very limited. It's like what you see on the television screen. You see the screen but behind it is a tremendous array of wave interference patterns. It's almost like a trance state; there's a change in your sense of reality. It's a different kind of perspective than, for instance, if you try to remember your childhood and even babyhood. It has an impact on your consciousness that seems totally out of sync with the present. The present seems real and those impressions seem to belong not just to the past, but to another perspective. 

In that state you can't see details. It's like seeing the sea instead of the waves. That's what I mean by seeing things in their context. If you fly very high you can't see the trees in the forest, but you see the forest. You see implications in your problems that you can't see when you're standing there at a close range. There's no way of explaining it to other people or even to yourself. Language was made to give vent to the usual perspective and not for this alternative perspective where everything seems to be intermeshed with everything else. 

Toggle between the two perspectives just like we did with the flower. You get back to your personal perspective of the problem and then you move away. When you move away, you're much more aware of the emotions behind the problem. In fact, you see the problem as the crystallization of the emotional forces behind it. That is what is meant by the witness in the heavens. It requires you to let go, not only of your body consciousness but also of your personality. 
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 Vantage Point of the Angel 

Switch your perspective again, upwards instead of backwards. Consider that you have been in some way inveigled in the world. You've lost the sense of your pristine identity. Your relationship with the existential condition shows you that an aspect of yourself has accrued to what you were. It might have been tarnished but it's still there. It will give you an aesthetic sensitivity, like looking at the things from the vantage point of the angel. You are very sensitive to the purity or impurity of people, and therefore to authenticity or manipulation, even grossness. It's a very sharpened sense of emotion that is of course evidenced by your choice of music, your choice of clothing, your choice of where you live, even your relationships with people. 

Can you look at your problem from the vantage point of the angel now? It is as though mud had been cast on the snow. That is a more perfunctory way of looking at it because it would be irretrievable, irreversible. A better way of looking at it is the mass being celebrated in a concentration camp. Your soul is so pained to see the sacrilege that one gets into in the problem. The purpose doesn't justify the means. People take up a cause, like knights. For example, when we were fighting the Nazis, sometimes the very people who were fighting for the cause slipped into the same things they were fighting against. Once we saw Germans struggling in the burning water. There were flames around them and they were hoping we would rescue them, but our captain refused. That's the kind of thing I mean. You commit yourself to a cause and make yourself believe you're following that cause. One tends to use means that contradict one's cause, that defeat it in fact. Seeing that is looking at things from the vantage point of the angel. 

The only weapon of the angel is a sword of light to bring into the open those situations that are murky and covered up. Then the forces of evil tend to disperse like the bare mountain at the pinching of dawn. It is the understanding of the heart instead of the understanding of the mind. Your judgment of a person is the result of the sensitivity of your heart, how your heart feels when meeting a person. If you're sensitive and that person has a beautiful soul, your heart is shattered. You feel like crying with joy. 
God is the essence of beauty; it is His love of beauty which has caused Him to express His own beauty in manisfestation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The discovery of beauty is the most shattering, overwhelming, and transforming experience. This kind of perspective is enhanced if you are able to earmark the angelic counterpart of your being which is interspersed with the subtle body and the physical body. It's not up there somewhere in the heavens; it's right here. It's not quite like the aura. It has some kind of a structure but not a physical structure. It's the eternal face and that's what is meant in the Qur'an by "everywhere is the face of God." It doesn't mean the physical face, it's something intangible. 
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Now you make that quantum leap into the Jabarut stage. You have to pass through that place where everything is assessed according to the sense of your sensitivity, to access a whole different way of thinking. Remember that rishi who had such a problem trying to understand that man who was asking him a question? It was a totally different way of seeing. You are seeing not just the issues active in the problem as you did before; you're seeing the programming. It's as though there is some kind of veil now separating where you are from where you used to be when you were judging your problem. You've passed that threshold. You can't judge your problems the same way any more. You realize your judgment about the problems is totally off. Eventually you see the secret to this is just to get into Arwah, the subtle body, the electromagnetic field, and then particularly the aura.
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The Divine Glance

Now suppose you're walking through a lovely forest in a state of ecstasy thinking, "Yes, my eyes are the eyes through which God sees. In fact they are the eyes through which God sees his own body." That is a whole new dimension. St. Francis was walking in the forest and, instead of just observing the surface of the leaves and the trunks of the trees, he was really getting into the consciousness of the trees. That's a million times more wonderful than just enjoying the environment. That's why he said, "That which you're looking for is looking at you." He saw that the tree was looking at him. 
You thought you were the spectator, but the real spectator is in the heavens.
Suhrawardi

 The Eyes Through Which God Sees 

God is looking through my eyes. God knows himself through the knowledge I have of him. Does the universe know itself through the knowledge we have of it? It's one in the same. When we think to ourselves, "Oh this is it, this is it!" we'll find ourselves in a wonderful state. God looks, there is only one supreme spectator. 

At a certain point you realize there is a further outlook. If you say, "I am the eyes through which God sees," you're still thinking in terms of duality, God and Me. The ultimate reality is unity, oneness. You're trying to imagine your glance is the Divine glance, but it's not an instrument. 
He is the seer and also that through which he sees. 
Ibn' Arabi 
Your eyes and your body are the extension of the Divine being. Don't think it is God and you, it's all one. My glance is the Divine glance. It has been greatly limited by my perspectives, but it is the Divine glance. Now close your eyes and then for a very short time just open your eyes like a shutter in a camera. Let's do that practice we have done previously. While you have your eyes closed imagine your glance is like two headlamps of a car, even though it's the light of your eyes. The Divine glance is the light of intelligence, it's not me being the instrument of the Divine glance. The Divine glance is the luminous intelligence. As I turn my head the Divine glance is scanning the horizon. That glance has a penetrating effect, but it's not like clairvoyance, it's the light of intelligence that sees into the souls of beings. 

Let go of the experience of your consciousness. Allow it to become blank. You are luminous intelligence instead of consciousness, and that intelligence is not fragmented. It is the Divine intelligence that's been edited, circumscribed. Now instead of thinking of yourself as the Divine glance, your understanding is the Divine understanding. Your intelligence is isomorphic, the same nature as the Divine nature. Think as God thinks. 
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The thinking of the universe has been monitored by the way matter has evolved to the point of fabricating these wonderful brains. It's the same intelligence which has an inherent knowledge that is not based upon experience. It could be matched by experience. That's Jabarut. You don't have access to it without having gone through the Malakut, the angelic, celestial level. 
You reach a point at which the witness in you is your celestial being. 
Shahabuddin Suhrawardi
 Celestial Consciousness 

Now that sounds very beautiful, but how does it apply? There is a consciousness of the body for example. When I go to the dentist, I am aware my pain is my body consciousness. The body is conscious of itself. Cells are conscious. When I have quandaries in my mind, or I am let down by people, or shattered by the encounter with another person, it is the consciousness of my psyche that is affected, not the consciousness of my body. At each level there is a setting of consciousness. It is not the consciousness of my body or the consciousness of my psyche that is active or functioning when I identify with my aura. It is a different kind of consciousness. That's what Suhrawardi means. At the celestial level it is another kind of consciousness that takes over. 

The real witness in you is the witness in the heavens. That means you're judging things from the point of view of the angel. I'll give you an example of this. I was visiting a rishi in a cave in the Himalayas. It was very dangerous to go through that jungle because of the wild animals. We had to go through mountains and there were monks and sanyasins. Here was this man in samadhi. We disturbed his peace by asking questions. Most rishis don't speak when in samadhi, but he condescended to speak. One man asked a silly question. I could see him descending from samadhi and trying to see how one thinks in human consciousness. It's a totally different way of thinking. 

If you want to reach that point, you have to see how incongruous our human thinking is. If you're convinced it is valid or ultimate, you'll never be able to reach beyond it. That's why one questions one's thinking. You can see people are caught in their thinking. If you're a psychotherapist, you listen to people speaking and you can see exactly where they are at. They are speaking from what they can see. If you're a good therapist you see something beyond what they see; otherwise you can't help them. This is what we're learning now. We're learning to think differently to our ordinary way of thinking. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls it the reason of reason. 
Ecstasy is born out of the reason of reasons.
Ibn' Arabi 
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If you are aware of an object, it has already escaped you. You are inhabited by a passion for the unattainable. Your intuition tells you there is something beyond. It can't be the object of your knowledge you see or of your experience; it's beyond the existential level. It's like a threshold. When you cross the threshold you are not conscious of the physical world around you, you don't even have a memory of it. You're not conscious of your thoughts, particularly your creative imagination. There's a barrier there and you have to make a quantum leap, passing through a blackout and trusting that you will find yourself on the other side. 

There is no awareness of the physical world because the mirror doesn't show us what's behind it. It's a tremendous achievement not being aware of the physical world any more, or even of one's thoughts. I don't even advise it because we need a lot of training to be able to do it without freaking out. You could think, "I can't get back." One says there is a faulty sense of reality, I would say a faulty sense of actuality. It's very difficult to make that quantum leap. You have to put your trust in your intuition and real intuition is not based upon experience. If you see clues in experience, then your intuition is not genuine. For example, someone who has a very clear and tidy mind and lives a very tidy life dresses up as a hobo and visits a seer. The seer says, "You can't fool me." If the seer went by the clues, he/she would think this person was slovenly. So in a simplistic way we say we learn to trust intuition. 

Now be aware of the light in your eyes. It's not just the physical phenomena of the emission of light from the retina. It has to do with an attitude of very powerful Divine love that does not brook of either personal power or any kind of psychological resentment, just pure loving, giving light. It comes from a place of absolute sincerity in contact with the very depth of one's soul and then it manifests through one's glance and communicates to other beings. 

 Light Upon Light 

Let's do a practice. Place your thumb of your right hand under your chin and the middle finger of your right hand on your right nostril but don't press against it yet. Rest the palm of your left hand on the back of your right hand and the thumb of your left hand on your left nostril. Now breathe in through the left and press the right nostril. Hold your breath and turn your eyeballs upwards. Exhale through the right nostril. Now inhale through the right nostril, hold your breath, and exhale through the left nostril. Now breathe through both nostrils, hold your breath, and exhale through both nostrils. 
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When you turn your eyeballs upwards with your eyelids closed, you could also curl your tongue and press the bottom of your tongue against your palate as you inhale and hold your breath. Exhale, bring your eyes in their forward position and feel the light you are emitting as the light of the heavens instead of the light that emanates from your own person. The first light came from the depth of the solar plexus and this light comes through the top of your head. 

As you breathe in transfer your attention from the bottom of your spine, passing through each chakra until you reach the top of your head, and image a flame rising in your spine. When you hold your breath, turn your eyeballs upward and press your tongue against your palate. There you may still be aware of your aura as a support system, but you identify now with being luminous intelligence. When you exhale that luminous intelligence seems to be monitored by your glance. That is a light upon a light. 

 The Mind Rides the Wind

Your glance is not like an x-ray that sees through matter. It's like the ability to grasp the thinking matter, the intelligence buried in matter. Consequently you are able to see right into the souls of people with the light of truth. You are aware of the energy of your body. You could even feel the cells of your body as live beings endowed with some relative intelligence, will, drive and also pain, and being able to communicate and reproduce themselves. An effervescence of life is taking place within your body. That enormous breakthrough of energy from the moment of the Big Bang has accumulated in the course of evolution across the galaxies. It is still active and your body is a fantastic support system for your understanding which is buried within that matter, but which tends to emerge. In the Tibetan expression, "the mind rides the wind," the wind is your energy and the mind is your understanding, your intelligence, your consciousness. 

The wind can be directed as you wish, so you could direct that energy outward and communicate with life wherever you go. Imagine sitting in nature and the flowers begin to blossom. You have a healing power, you are communicating life. One can shake oneself physically because the energy gets sclerosed and you can activate it by directing the energy up through the whole body but centered in the spine. Think of that energy as a lift, or as the story of Pegasus, the winged steed that carries your consciousness aloft. When your consciousness is attuned to a high pitch it is as though you covered some distance from the Earth plane. You can get into the consciousness of illuminated beings, angels, and archangels.
Spiritual attainment is attuning oneself to a higher pitch.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The support system that is your body is an expression of your being, not just a support system you can don and cast aside. It is multi-tiered so it exists at several levels, but all we know is the commonplace physical one. It includes the subtle body and aura. Your subtle body is not just another body; it acts as a template in the formation of your body and as it changes, your body changes. It also represents how your body is transmuted at the first level so it's exactly like your body. Imagine a force field that has the same kind of configuration, and then consider your aura to be a first stage in the transmutation. There are several auras, one more subtle than the other. These thoughts will act as the rungs of a ladder which will help you shift your consciousness from one level to the other without abandoning your body. 
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It's the other way around. As you transmute your body, you are prefiguring resurrection. There's no doubt that resurrection requires letting go of the contingent aspect of one's being. A very good illustration of resurrection would be the way flowers are able to transform themselves into perfume, and that's how they survive the demise of the support system which is their contingent aspect. At the level of the psyche it means one has to let go of personal spite or anger, covetousness, and envy, which are all mind games. One tries to justify oneself when one is faced with a bad self-image. That self image is a bad strategy and counterproductive. There is a catharsis throughout, but it doesn't take place by pushing it out; the replenishing of one's being occurs by the power of unconditional love.

I'm talking about loving the people who hurt you, do you harm, or counter you. In the words of Christ, "They don't know what they do." Why do you blame them if they don't know what they do? You just don't blame them anymore. You still love them. You could think, "I'm sorry they feel the need to have these feelings against me. It's like when a little child kicks me, I still love the child." 
Love is a weapon that can break all obstacles on one's path in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If you speak about psychological energy instead of physical energy, you will notice it has an extraordinarily uplifting effect. Your soul rises immediately. It seems to be unburdened by the pull of the Earth. You feel as though you are rising with some degree of independence from earthly conditions. You are no longer addicted to the support system and that means shifting from thinking about the circumstances of your life, your problems, or your personality. You can put your psyche into the hands of that wonderful self-organizing power. It will take care of your psyche just like your body programming takes care of your heart beat, your digestive process, and hormonal exchanges.

Be conscious of your aura again. You don't identify with it but you become very conscious of it. You become conscious of the very warm radiation of the heart which is just like the sun. According to the Sufis, the souls of men and women are light and it's the light of intelligence rather than a physical light. Our souls are the fragments of the archangels of the planets, of the sun, of the solar system, and of the galaxies. All are part of the one and only Being who is God, the light of lights that has been fragmenting itself down to that minute fragment of light that is the soul of man. We experience our relationship with the hierarchies of beings of light. Every fragment is continually in touch with the group of which it is a fragment, being the Divine glance. The glance is the luminous intelligence which thrusts its light upon all things.
The light illuminates the path of those who are distant from it; those who are near are dazzled by it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We need to overcome the dichotomy in our minds between the Divine glance and the human glance. Instead of thinking that you are the eyes through which God sees, as in the first stage, think that your glance is the Divine glance that is looking into the universe. It has been mitigated, distorted, darkened, denigrated, but it is the Divine glance, the glance of the king or the queen, that gives light and life to all things. 
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We do the next practice from the second stage, "I am the Divine glance." You're conscious of being the extension of the hierarchies of luminous intelligences, the ramification of the Nur al-Anwar, the light of lights. A fragment got itself alienated from its source, and all you have to do is to establish your lines of communication with the origin of your consciousness. 

Instead of just thinking of very abstract lights of intelligence, you could get into the consciousness of the archangels of the planets and stars. You don't just want to get into fantasy. Tune yourself to the sun and all the glory that accompanies a sunrise, and realize that's only the outer manifestation of the being of the sun. That doesn't mean the archangel of the sun has a body or a figure or a countenance like that of a human being. Once you've established your connection with the being of the sun rather than the physical light such as it is experienced from the Earth, you have access to further and further levels and more cosmic beings of light. Remember this principle: it's not good enough just to try to contact that being; one has to experience oneself as that being. Get into the consciousness of that being. You have to become like the sun or bring the being of the sun through. Beyond that, there are still more cosmic beings, each being a fragment of the group which is hierarchically above. 

 Luminous Intelligence 

Now we pass to the next degree and see the connection between our glance and the light of luminous intelligence that becomes consciousness. We are able to start working with the third eye. One shouldn't work with the third eye if one is projecting one's own glance. You can avoid getting into a very personal trip by thinking of the glance of Pir-o-Murshid, a very sacred, divine glance that looks right into the soul, but is not in any way inquisitive or personal. It's a glance that has become totally purified like you just bathed your glance in heavenly light. When one has connected up one's personal glance with its origin, the first thing to do is to work with the eyes.

As we did previously, think of your eyes as headlamps of a car as you inhale and project those beams forward in the dark as you exhale. Concentrate on a beam of light that descends through the crown center like a shaft of light and then is refracted forward as a beam through some point in the forehead at the pineal gland. As you exhale, that beam is aimed at the spotlight created by the convergence of the beams of your two eyes. Now connect up your glance with the whole hierarchy of beings of light and know that your glance is like an extension of the light that sees instead of the light that is seen, the light of the hierarchies of the beings of light, of the pure luminous intelligences. It's important to draw the light from very high up, not just concentrating the horizonal beam of the the third eye, but linking it up with the shaft of light that descends.That will give a tremendous intensity and penetration to your glance.
Since my soul has caught Thy light, my glance has become a comet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

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Now as you inhale turn your eyeballs upwards and immediatley the third eye will turn itself upwards. Your consciousness will rise in the fountain of light at the top of the head and you'll reach right up. Exhale once more and bring all that light down and through the third eye. Instead of concentrating on the light emitted by your physical eyes, concentrate entirely on the third eye. This is the secret of looking into the souls of people. Do not simply identify with the beam that emerges from the pineal. You have to link it up with the spirit that descends, otherwise you develop a kind of hypnotic gaze. That's just what we don't want. It must always be beautiful, impersonal, heavenly, pure, untainted, not Luciferian light The Sufis call it "generous light." It's not an inquiring ego light; it's a loving light.

The glance is set now; when you open your eyes you should be able to keep your eyes at infinity and not allow your eyes to be focused by the objects in front of you. You don't "see," you just cast light. It's a very wonderful practice and it's important because that's the way of using light to commune with people. That light of the Divine glance will cut right into the souls of people. It will not only reveal to you their deepest motivations and their attunement, but will reveal themselves to themselves, relieving them of the obstacles that stand in the way of unfurling their potentials. That is why the Divine glance is not only cognitive but also creative.

People begin to be aware of their light and both of you get really high exchanging, illuminating each other with the light of your eyes. Try it. It's a very tangible way of doing what you want to do while conversing with people, being involved with life.
Souls unite at the meeting of a glance.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Do this every day until it becomes strong in you. You have to be stronger than the environment; don't allow yourself to be conditioned by the environment. You are thrusting light; the light of the heavens is coming through you. Occasionally you could attune yourself to getting into the consciousness of the intelligences, the whole hierarchy of beings of light. Close your eyes, inhale, hold your breath and as you exhale open your eyes and cast that light forward. If you get a shock from the physical world when you open your eyes, just breathe through it and remember your attunement. Don't be afraid of opening your eyes as long as you keep your concentration; it's only for a short while when you're exhaling. If you want to protect your glance from the shock of contact with the physical world, you have to find yourself in a transfigured world; you mustn't let your consciousness get right down to the physical perspective of the universe. You are experiencing that which transpires behind that which appears. What appears is just an illusion anyway; it's not the way things are. Don't let yourself be caught in it.
God is the one who sees, and that through which he sees, and that which he sees. 
Ibn' Arabi
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All of a sudden you begin to see things as that rishi saw them. You find it difficult to get back into your ordinary thinking now because you've gone to a totally new way of thinking, the way the universe thinks. It is the Divine intention, the intimacy of the court. You're in the presence of the king, chosen to be privy to the Divine strategy. 

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The Temple of Light

A sensitive person has a great need for the sacred. One needs to protect one's very fragile soul against the turbulence and grossness, vulgarity and ruthlessness one finds in the world. How does one be in the world but not of the world? How does one be an ascetic in the middle of married life with children? How does one preserve one's attunement where one's soul is being pummeled all the time from all directions?

In the course of history our societies have built temples and churches in order to seek refuge, so one is able to find one's soul again in favorable circumstances. The purpose of the temple is to provide a safe place for worship, to give expression to the nostalgia of one's soul. The nomads, whether they were Jews or Arabs, found that since they were always on the move they could not rely upon a place where they could find peace and the sacred attunement of their being. They realized they had to create their own temple. Living in our modern societies, you might benefit by dedicating a room in your home that would be your temple for your meditation, but not all of us can afford even that in our crowded lives. So the answer is to build an inner temple out of one's own being.

The thing about the temple is that it provides one with a threshold marking a very definite transit from the profane to the sacred, and marking a protection so one is able to find peace within one's self without being subjected to the impressions coming on all sides. One can seek refuge in that temple, even when one is right in the middle of activity, because one has built that temple from within. It's always there.

 Drawing Light from Within 

A good model is Buddha sitting in the middle of a storm. As you know, the center of a whirlpool or a whirlwind is a vacuum. So the sense is being able to touch upon that inner peace that suffuses one's being from within. The Buddhist conception of peace is not escape, but an active, all-pervading peace that gains ground and pushes away the turbulence accruing from outside.

How do you create this temple out of the fabric of your being? One needs to draw light from within, instead of from without. One needs to absorb it. Your temple could be a temple of light. 

The secret is in a practice that is the very heart of Yoga practices, calledYoni Mudra, and also Sufi practices, called Shaghal. It is a way of communicating from within. Consciousness is always interfacing experience from without. If you find the doors closed, then consciousness is able to discover the world from within. That's the whole point about the threshold; it builds a protective membrane. It's just like the cathedral. There are windows, so this is not a total separation from the outside world, but still one communicates from inside.
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This is not my body, it is the temple of God; this is not my heart, it is the altar in the temple of God.  
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
 Building the Temple 

How do you build this temple of light? You could perform the Dhikr of light. As you go into the circle with your head moving from left to right think of your aura as a temple of light. At the same time you are evacuating the center to have a space for the presence of God. You invite the Presence, encouraging the all-pervading light from within. You can imagine it is like the candles on the altar. 

In building this very sacred temple it is important to realize the cells of the body absorb light from the environment, including cosmic rays from outer space. The cells emit as well as transmit light into the environment. The aura in its purely physical aspect is constituted by the radiation of this light that sparkles as the cells divide in mitosis, the nerve cells being the most effective. Since the brain is made of an intense concentration of nerve cells, the brain is lit up from inside. The optic nerves, being an extension of the brain, project the middle range frequencies of this light through the retina and cornea into space, but the high frequency ultraviolet light passes through the skull and can be beamed by dint of visualization.

Visualizing a form projects part of the aura into a real light structure in space, like a hologram. This structure is greatly enhanced by moving the body repeatedly in a regular architectonic motion.
The exercise of Dhikr sets the heart to rhythm.  
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Imagine that you are gazing courageously into a blinding light.  
To look into the sun, one has to have eyes like the sun.  
Plotinus
Close your eyelids, turn your eyeballs upwards, and as you inhale, concentrate on the intense light in the brain. Visualize the corona of sparkling diaphanous light, colorless and diamond-like, although flickering flashes of multi-colored light appear as a corona above your head. Now hold your breath with your eyeballs still turned upwards. Focus above your head, and fix your attention on your intelligence that you represent as having the ability to cast light upon things, yet not a physical light. As you exhale, imagine the luminous intensity of your awareness and wakefulness enhancing the effulgence of the beams which you visualize as sky blue cast from your eyes. Moreover, visualize a third beam that you imagine to be violet, cast forward through the middle of your forehead.
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As you inhale with eyes upturned, visualize the corona. Now as you exhale, converge the two beams of your glance, which are blue, into a spotlight suspended in the void, approximately six feet ahead. Concentrate on the violet beam breaking through the blue spotlight. Visualize the spotlight as a blue sapphire being traversed by a violet beam. At this stage as you exhale, notice the green hue emitted by your pharyngeal plexus, your throat chakra and the glorious golden radiance of your cardiac plexus, the heart chakra.

The moment has come to begin the motion of the Dhikr of light. As you exhale, rotate your upper body counter-clockwise around that pivot of your body that is the solar plexus. First describe a violet circle with your third eye, accompanied by a blue concentric circle. Now the diamond-like colorless with flashing hues outer circle is described by your head, and the golden inner circle by your heart. By sheer force of repetition, these circles become almost indelible. You have literally constructed a whole structure of light around your body, numberless bands of hues aligned in concentric circles after the model of the spectrum, like a rainbow. By widening the circles, they appear as ever-extending spirals, a vortex of light.

To extend these into concentric spheres instead of two-dimensional vortici, you now rotate your head and upper body forward and downward, then upward again as you inhale, eventually returning to the left and right motion as you exhale. We now have two meridians building a three-dimensional light structure. Notice the left-right motion conveys the impression of an ever-widening sphere which is centrifugal, whereas the forward-backward motion gives you the impression of drawing within, centripetal. The protective membrane of the temple is your radiance, not a barrier; it filters and transmutes light from the environment. You have fashioned with your aura a temple of light. It is a splendid vortex of light in that infinite temple of light shaped by the galaxies.

You introduce a moment of retention of your breath between the inhaling and the exhaling, so toward the end of the inhaling, you concentrate on the void in the solar plexus. Immediately shift your attention from the solar plexus to the heart chakra, and you experience this upward flow of newborn life, energy and radiance.
Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine Light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now if you were endowed with the spirit of a dervish and started revolving like the Mevlevi, the meridians, being circles or spirals of light, would indubitably form an ever-extending sphere of sheer effulgence. You are dancing, revolving like a star in the choreography of light of the heavens!

Still holding your breath, you quicken your heart chakra with the breath of pure spirit you experience descending in the temple of light you built through an aperture at the top. You are being receptive to the light of intelligence descending into the center of the temple. The light from the heavens descends, meets the light emerging from inside, and the two congregate in the altar. Now as you hold your breath, the light of pure intelligence descends upon the altar in your heart. You have the impression that the temple of light has been transfigured into a further temple of subtler light that appears to adumbrate the temple of physical light, and seems positioned a little higher up, spacewise. This feeling may be perpetrated further and further in infinite regress.
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Our glorification strengthens this level of our being. It's not our imagination any more, not our realization. It's our glorification. Instead of just thinking of the temple, you could think that you're the priest in the temple. You're performing a cosmic celebration service at the altar, and you're in ecstasy. You're so deeply moved by the miracle of what's happening. The influence from above is being felt in anticipation of that moment when we hold our breath, you experience the Holy Spirit, but it's not samadhi.  

Move your head to its normal position, the glance horizontal. Breathe. Imagine the circle as a spiral as you exhale, and then the convergence in the center. Imagine the upward motion, and then the descending motion. Imagine the sequence of thought and simply stay in a state of suspense without thought because you have triggered off thoughts at higher levels of your being of which you may not be aware in your ordinary mind, but they are there. Think of the mind and think of the heart and think of the soul. There are different levels of thinking and at the soul level it's not formulated in categories of thoughts broken up into fragments. It's more realization than thinking.  

Now focus on the light. The very beautiful temple is being built out of the fabric of the light of your own being. One is forming a protective membrane by whirling that light, yet one is also radiating that light so it's not just a protective mechanism, but it has a radiating force and that radiation acts as protection. As radiation comes, it radiates from the heart, from the altar in the temple.

Your aura is now the temple. You may be aware of the flame in the center of your aura, and that is what will give you a sense of being able to hoist your consciousness into the abstract planes within the temple. 

The temple offers you a protection in order to be able to hoist yourself. Think of the aperture at the top of the temple. You know the concept of the descent of the Holy Spirit, but there is also the opposite, the ability to hoist your being, to be able at any moment to let your consciousness enter the higher planes within the temple and beyond the temple.

You protect the sacred from the profanity of the world by the power of your aura. We not only need to fashion this temple, but also fulfill our human role in the temple as priest, as knight, as hermit, as devotee, as musician, as verger, as sweeper, and many more.
What the moon seems to give as light, is not its own; it is the light of the sun. So it is with the Divine messengers.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Sufis speak about the light that can be seen and the light that sees. The light that can be seen is the light of your aura which is the temple you're building, but the light that sees is not your aura. It's the way your intelligence beams upon all things, like a laser beam in a hologram. 
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You could think of the temple then as a hologram of light, with several levels in the hologram. You've got this temple of light and you're beaming the light of your awakened intelligence upon this hologram of light, which then begins to burst into a tremendous outbreak of light. You're exalted in the emotion, and the emotion is the ecstasy of light. You have an impression of something absolutely magnificent and you realize you are the temple of light.






A Longing for the Unattainable



by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan



Inspired by the Teaching of
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

First Edition, February 1997
Second Printing, July 1997


   The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in August 1996 at The Institute of Mental Physics, Joshua Tree California.

   Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. 

   Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 






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.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
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Beyond the Beyond

We're going to go through the steps leading to the realization, which is often identified with samadhi, but which I would call awakening beyond life.  Let us try to explore what we mean by transcendence, instead of just saying the word.  We want to experience what the word cosmic means, and we want to experience what turning within means.  Now we're going to try to experience what is meant by transcendence. We have heard the expression 'transcendental meditation,' which was used by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  If we look at a dictionary, we find both the words transcendent and transcendental.  What's the difference? Well our dictionary gives us terms used in mathematics.  Maharishi was a mathematician. Both are different expressions of going beyond.  In Yoga one calls it parat param, beyond the beyond.  That corresponds with what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls "a longing for the unattainable," because it's always further.  He said, "The further you advance, the further the horizon advances."

There are practical practices which we do with our body, like breathing.  They don't quite get us there, but if they are done in conjunction with a shift in our sense of identity and a shift in our perspective - the focus of our consciousness - then they are effective.  To find the basis behind these practices, we need to differentiate between our modalities of consciousness. One is, to quote the Tibetan Buddhists, the gross body and the kind of thinking that corresponds with the gross body.  In Sufism the gross body is Nazut,  and Khayal is the kind of thinking corresponding to the gross body.  That's the kind of simplistic thinking that we're all into, like, "How do you feel? How do you feel about what that person did to you?"  That's elementary.  

Next there is the subtle mind, the subtle body and the subtle mind.  What the Tibetans say is that the mind rides the wind, like Belerophon rode Pegasus.  If we shift our sense of bodiness to our subtle body, we'll discover a mode of thinking different from the one that we've been assuming so far.  Sufis call that subtle body Arwah., and the kind of thinking that corresponds with it is at the Mithal level.  If we want to remember the word Mithal - the world of metaphor - it is reminiscent of the word mythology. Mithal is the world of creative imagination. The gross mind is interpreting the experience of the environment, whereas Mithal, the subtle mind, is projecting creative thoughts upon the environment and transforming the environment by those creative thoughts.  

Creativity always starts by a kind of insight, or a kind of emotion that emerges from within and takes shape.  Therefore, we have the wazaif  Khaliq, which means creative imagination, and Mussawir, which means fashioning - so what was pure realization becomes actually fashioned into a shape. We're working with the face of our subtle body, and the way that we can fashion it, not by trying to work on its physical structure, but simply by means of our attunement.  
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Now we find that in order for our creativity to be really effective, it must include the higher levels of our being. If our creativity does not include the higher levels of our being, then it is of the domain of fantasy.  If we look at works of art, or if we are a connoisseur of music, we see right away that some composers are just casting their personal rubbish upon us in their music, or painting, or so on.  For $10,000 we can buy their own personal rubbish from their psyche.  It's awful,  but it fetches a high price because it resonates with the rubbish of other people.  They see themselves in it.  There is no accounting for taste.  It depends upon  what the levels of our values are, our value system.  According to the Sufis,  for creativity to be sacred art rather than profane art, we need to include those higher levels of our being.  What do we mean by "higher levels of our being?"  

We cannot just assume there are higher levels of our beings.  We want to experience them; but experience is interpreted.  We limit our experience by our interpretation of it.  Therefore, it's necessary to understand that the word "higher" is deceptive.  It's not higher.  If we think it is higher, then we will do astral travel and we'll start fainting.  There will be a break between our physical body and our subtle body.  Then we'll go on a flight, an astral trip.  I love that, actually, just like I love hang gliding.  But that's recreation, and not what we're trying to experience here.  Also, it makes a break in our constitution, our underpinning.  Let's say we're driving a car and all of a sudden we go into astral projection, we could have an accident.  So we don't teach that, although there are schools that do teach it.  Perhaps we should not even use the word higher because it does affect our meditation. We tend to look up and think that the heavens are 'up there,' and the earth is 'down here.' 

It's true that psychologically we have this kind of geographical representation of levels; but space is only meaningful where matter is concerned.  That is the reason why these higher meditations are described in Buddhism as beyond space. It's not beyond space.  The universe is like a hologram.  We can have different perspectives of that hologram.  One is not higher than the other. It just depends upon our perspective.  We can highlight a certain cross section of the hologram, and then we can highlight another one.  Then perhaps we can oscillate between the two, and perhaps then we can extrapolate between two or more.  That's theory, but I say that because we may have some misleading ideas when we are doing these meditations that might cause us to have a split in our personality.  

So far that's what we've been doing.  We found Mithal, the subtle mind, the subtle way of thinking, when we turned within.  Our sense of bodiness was shifted into a sense of being a subtle body.  Then we found that this subtle body is not 'within,' that it does not have a boundary. Think of it as a vortex that doesn't have a boundary.  It's just because of not having turned our consciousness outside that we were able to sense something  coming through us from the void of the vortex. 
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There are two steps here; one is inhaling, the other exhaling.  First of all, we ingest the physical environment, also the psychological environment.  We have to make some selection between those psychological ingredients that we feel comfortable about incorporating into our psyche, and those which we can't handle.  There are several lines of defense.  As we proceed deeper and deeper, we get more to the core of our being.  We realize that in the peripheral areas of our psyche, there is a spillover with the environment, that it's not quite us. That's why we're playing a role and wearing a mask,  whereas  the further we go inside, the more we discover who we really are.  That's why I ask, "What is our eternal face, or our celestial face behind our physical face?" That's who we really are, the core of our personality instead of the outer aspects of our idiosyncrasies.  Then somehow in the vortex - there is a void in the center of a vortex - all of this stuff that accrues to us from the environment and is incorporated in our psyche get's resorbed into the void.  Therefore we hold our breath.  It's not recycled exactly, just as a wave in the sea is not recycled.  The whole sea emerges as each new wave.  As we exhale we have to try to capture the new being that is emerging within us - within our old being - and really identify with it.  We find it is accompanied by some kinds of projections, for example, a new face.  Our celestial face is not static.  It's dynamic, it's continually changing, its the way we could be if we would be as we might be.  

The creativity that starts to emerge from within gets completed by, enriched by, our discovering our being at all levels. The next step is identifying ourselves with our very subtle body. Then comes the very subtle mind, that is matched with the very subtle body.  The very subtle body is what the Sufis call Malakut,  which is the angelic, our celestial counterpart.  The mode of thinking corresponding to that is called Jabarut.  Instead of defining it, we'll try to experience it.  In preparation I suggest we grasp our celestial countenance by thinking of it as being modeled in the fabric of light.  Our subtle body would be a body of energy, but the very subtle body is a body of light.  Our celestial countenance, fashioned in the fabric of celestial light, will eventually affect our aura of physical light.  In fashioning, we must be careful  not to think we can change its configuration by our will.  It will only respond to our emotional attunement and to our level of realization.  

It's not a matter of either imagining or seeing it, but of identifying with it to the extent that we consider our body - first our subtle body, then our physical body - as being the other way around.  We consider our celestial counterpart as the template which configures our subtle body, and the subtle body as the template which configures our physical body.  It depends whether we want to identify with the outcome of the template, which is the body, or if we want to identify with the template itself.  
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The word template is not quite correct, because a template is generally a form, whereas this is more like a code than a form.  Also a template is static, whereas this is dynamic.  Therefore it would be more accurate to use the word matrix. The reality of our body is our DNA.  The body itself is a secondary result.  But the reality behind it is our DNA code.  

That represents a different level of thinking than thinking in terms of forms and space.  We think of form as the result of a reality that does not have a form.  That is why Buddha calls this level beyond existence.  That means space does not have any meaning at this level, but what happens at this level is translated in space in terms of form.  

This level of thinking is different from what we encountered when we turned within.  When we turned within we were projecting thoughts, and forms that were emerging, into a form.  Now we are letting that happen without concerning ourselves about it.  Ibn' Arabi says, "This is beyond imagination,"  because imagination is always translating thought into a form, an image.  

Now we're beginning to realize our real being not only beyond the physical substantiality of our participation in the bodiness of the cosmos, but beyond our form.  The angel does not have a form.  I'm talking about configuring, or fashioning, the fabric of non-physical light, celestial light.  The flowers photographed by Walter Chappel by ultraviolet light don't have a contour or a profile.  That configuration is much more subtle than what we imagine form to be, because we always imagine form to have a profile.  It's more like a kaleidoscope.  There is a lot of configuration, but not a form as such.  

It is important to pass from one echelon to the next in our ascent, rather than skipping the intermediary stages and just losing ourselves in samadhi.  That's what a lot of people do.  Then we've lost our connection with the physical world.  What we are doing is trying to be very clear about each step.  Then,  instead of leaving our body behind, we're able to extrapolate between those levels.  

We can still be aware of our physical body, but it is an outcome,  a secondary effect.  It's not the reality of our being.  It's the way the reality of our being imprints the fabric that the galaxies have offered us in our bodiness.  We can imagine ourselves as a being without body, although somehow connected with the body, imprinting the body.  We could think of ourselves as not having a form.  Although the reality of our being does manifest as a form, that form is an outcome.  

That's why Ibn' Arabi says that this is not imagination. Imagination is the way  a thought is expressed as a form.  I have spoken about the samsaric matrix of our being and the other matrices that affect the samsaric matrix.  They are not independent.  They are all connected.  Our creative thoughts will trigger off the force of mutation to bypass the recycling of our being. Otherwise we continue being what we are.  We won't progress. 
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In Sufism we are always seeing things from two polar vantage points simultaneously, the personal and the Divine.  Otherwise we are caught up in our personal samsaric being and simply recycle.  That's that other element, the way the sun affects the earth, and the galaxies affect the sun, and so on.  The way we can really grasp this is to be found in that formula of Ibn Arabi that says, "I know myself through the knowledge that God has of Himself through me."  We have those two vantage points, the personal and the Divine.  I know myself, but I can't know myself just by my knowledge of myself.  I have to let the Divine action, or the Divine vision in me, adumbrate my personal image of myself so I can see myself as I would be seen if God were contemplating me.  Moreso, because God is contemplating Him/Herself as me.  S/He is not contemplating me.  I am the mirror in which S/He is able to discover Him/Herself.

The next step is that God discovers Him/Herself, and that very expression of Him/Herself through which S/He reveals Him/Herself to us.  I know that's difficult to follow, but we are establishing a connection between ourselves and God.  It's not just theoretical.  It's experiential.  

We really have to foresee the next step in order to understand this step.  That is, we can only know the archetype through the exemplar.  We can only know rosehood through roses, or roundness through round objects, or peacefulness through peaceful people.  We do have an ability to move in our thinking from the exemplar to the archetype - the Sufis call it tawil.  Working with a wazifa, say compassion, I think of compassionate people. That is the exemplar.  Somehow that archetype is inherent in that exemplar.  Our mind is always able to imagine something more infinite or more perfect than it has imagined so far.  That's an idea of Henri Poincare, a mathematician.  We start with the thought, " I love this person who is compassionate." Actually, that person is really the donkey that is carrying the compassion.  It's the compassion that I love.  I think that I love the person, but it's the quality that is a Divine quality. Through the exemplar we are reaching to the archetype.  Ultimately we are seeing things from the Divine point of view, although at first it doesn't seem possible.  

Mithal, creativity, needs to incorporate all levels of our being instead of just being our personal fantasies.  We need to proceed from thinking in terms of exemplars to thinking in terms of archetypes.  That's the thinking of the very subtle mind instead of the subtle mind.  

Somehow the Divine viewpoint is subsumed within our viewpoint,  and we can awaken it.  It is virtual.  It's latent.  We can awaken it.  We can never say  we see things from the Divine point of view, because it's like the horizon.  It always recedes.  It's a capacity, beyond our limitation, that we have to reach.  In our thinking also, we have to reach beyond the limitation of our thinking.   
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I'll return to the formula of Ibn Arabi, "I know myself through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through me."  Imagine that the qualities in my personality are examples or exemplifications of Divine qualities, and that God is seeing how those archetypal qualities are actuated.  What are the possibilities within those archetypes? Otherwise, S/He would just be contemplating these archetypes without knowing what can be their consequence if they were actuated in existence.  The knowledge God acquires through us accrues to the knowledge God has in His/Her original state.  These two modes of knowledge, then, are ascribed to God.  Is that difficult to follow?  Does that make sense?  This is Sufism.  

It's very subtle of course.  It's very different from what they call in French brule les etats, that is not considering the intermediary steps.  That's reaching up, and then we lose ourselves.  At this stage then,  instead of thinking, "I am being seen by God," we must always think "My sight is subsumed within the Divine sight."  If I limit myself to my sight, my vantage point, then that possibility never materializes.  The realization, the intuition that there is a vantage point other than my vantage point - which I call the antipodal vantage point - helps me to free myself from the limitation of my vantage point.  If, at the Malakut level - the angelic level, the celestial sphere - I identify myself with the celestial counterpart of my being instead of with my subtle body, and therefore my aura, (not my physical aura but my celestial aura), that's the very subtle body. Then I discover something about myself that I could not ever discover if I were identifying with my physical body, or with my subtle body.  Now my view is not just my view.  It is really the way in which the Divine view begins to manifest in my view.  

My angelic countenance, although it's not a form, serves as a mirror in which God sees how His/Her qualities get configured into faces, into countenances, into figures, into forms.  Those forms that become adamant, or become crystallized, or become gelled at that level, are signs - that is indications - of what is behind, of the reality that has no form.  God reveals His/Her archetypal qualities by means of forms. If we are perceiving forms, then we must consider those forms as signs, indications, or clues. Then we find those signs in our own idiosyncrasies.  In our nature there are also signs.  These give us clues of the Divine nature coming through us.  At a certain point we discover our angelic nature. This is where God can disclose to us His/Her being in a much more wonderful way than could ever be disclosed in the forms of the world, or in the forms of our subtle bodies.  The consequence is not just in terms of realization, but in terms of emotion,  the Divine emotion at the discovery of the sublime as it starts manifesting on its way to more and more concrete forms, such as beauty and majesty.   
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The first stage is: I know myself through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through me. The next stage is: I know God through the knowledge God has of 

Him/Herself of the knowledge that I have of God. That's even more difficult. It's a mirroring effect.  First I know myself through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through me.  Then I know God through the knowledge God acquires through the knowledge that I have of God. The knowledge I have of God is due to the fact that I can always reach beyond the exemplar into the archetypes.  

This kind of thinking, and the matching emotion, has the effect of - I'm trying to avoid the word - elevating our soul.  Pir-o-Murshid says two things.  I think the most important is that we are able to loosen the  physical ties at the physical level.  That is, they become less constraining to us.  We find a kind of freedom from our addiction to the underpinning of our life.  He also says we are able to see how those ties work. Of course, it is our ability to see which loosens them.  We are able to see how our addiction was due to the fact that we were not able to look at them objectively, that we were caught up in them.  That's what Buddhism is saying also.  

The next step is that we discover our deathlessness, because we not only overcome the sense of space - form is always associated with space - but we also overcome the sense of the process of becoming,  of the passage of time and the idea of causality that goes with it.  As Buddha says, "It is only that which is subject to birth that is subject to death."  We discover a level of our being that is not subject to birth or to death, because it's a deathless state.  That does not mean that the past continues to live.  We have overcome any sense of the past or the future.  That's the meaning of the wazifa ya Samad, the eternal.  

This is the level called Jabarut, beyond Malakut, beyond the angelic state. What the Sufis say is, "Now God becomes known without the mediumship of the clues."  The clues are the forms of the world, the idiosyncrasies of our being.  These are clues through which something of the divine nature is conveyed.  Now the need for those clues has been overcome.  We are beyond the wazaif. That's where we encounter the Dhikr.  

Here, I know God not through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through me, but through the knowledge God has of Him/Herself through Him/Herself, without those devices. That means beyond qualities.  That means beyond what we are doing with wazaif.  

We discover an inherent knowledge, the same knowledge God has of Him/Herself, which is not founded upon experience.  Experience was the support system, the Pegasus that helped to free us from the trap of our vantage point.  Then we realized that God was manifesting Him/Herself through devices, as qualities - archetypes being devices. The reality of God is beyond the multiplicity of qualities.  We call it the Divine essence, dhat, instead of sifat.   
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Behind our perfunctory thinking there is the Divine thinking that is buried in our thinking.  When we pass through the dark night of understanding, we devalidate our personal thinking. Then the Divine thinking comes through.  As a matter of fact, Isaac Newton said that once; he said, "I think as God thinks."  That is right.  That's what physics is about, the thinking behind the universe. Our thinking is of the same nature as the Divine thinking, except that it has been blurred by the way we customize that thinking into our own personal vantage point.  If we are able to overcome that, then the Divine thinking comes through, and with it the Divine power, and the Divine emotion.  

The Buddhists call this beyond consciousness. As Pir-o-Murshid says, "Intelligence becomes consciousness when it is faced with  an object. When consciousness is deprived of an object, it returns to its ground which is intelligence."

We're speaking now about the level of knowing, Jabarut., the ultimate level of knowing.  The next level, Lahut, is the level of the seeds of existence.  The sifat, the qualities, the archetypes are the seeds. That corresponds to what the Hindus call sabijat, the seeds.  There is still multiplicity there.  Those are the treasures - the Sufis call them treasures.  Actually it's a word used in the Q'uran, "the treasure house."  There are tenuities, that is fine connections, between these treasures and their exemplification in the world.  That means nothing in the world exists except that it is connected with its hidden treasure in the treasury.  The angels form a ladder between these two.  That's an idea of Ibn' Arabi.  

This is the level at which the programming of the world is being devised. That's why the Sufis say we can be invited to the court of the king, where the strategy is being worked out, but only if we are trustworthy and we're up to that level of thinking. Then are we invited to participate in unc., the intimacy of the court of the king, privy to the Divine intention.  

Beyond that, we can reach into the unity which is Hahut, which is beyond thinking.  Thinking stopped at Jabarut.  Beyond this is the reality beyond thinking, ultimately the Divine presence without regard for any of the devices whereby God becomes manifest to Him/Herself, and to us by the same token. 

There is an idea of the wonderful scientist called Korzybski who said, "The map is not the territory."  If we know the steps, it's helpful.  Then we have to do it.  We'll discover territories much richer than the map could ever tell us.  This is Sufism.  It's parallel with Buddhism, and parallel with Hinduism.  That's why Pir-o-Murshid opened our souls to the vastness of all religions.  Perhaps I shouldn't say "this is Sufism," because that's just a language.  It's beyond any kind of ism.  It's the reality. 
 
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Freedom and Involvement


As we exhale, we consider that we are an extension of the Divine exhaling. In the course of that exhaling, in that flow, the sublime mystery moving the universe gets manifested and actuated at the existential level, in the universe, and in the cosmos, and in us. Our motivations become an expression of that Divine nostalgia, that the treasures hidden virtually in the world of mystery should become actuated in what we call the world of reality. 

This is typically Sufi because whereas the way of the ascetic is to give up the world, this is really a validation of our wish to build a beautiful world of beautiful people. Instead of thinking that goes counter to the spiritual ideal, it is the fulfillment of the Divine purpose. We don't have to have guilt feelings if we want to build a beautiful house, and have beautiful music or clothing, as long as it is really an expression of the Divine impulse that we call Ishq Allah. As soon as that impulse gets distorted by our ego, our identifying with a fraction of ourselves, it can turn against itself and have disastrous effects, cruelty, and violence, and all those things we see in the world today. So really the Sufi method here is to try and feel that Divine impulse in our motivations. 

As we inhale it's the other way around. We are trying to actuate our nostalgia for making the sublime into beauty and majesty, the feminine and masculine. In order to do so, we involve ourselves with people, and with situations which are confining; therefore it is always at the cost of our freedom. We are pulled in the opposite direction at the same time, which is our longing for freedom. So as we inhale, we give vent to this need for freedom. 

Our inhaling is an extension of the Divine inhaling whereby, according to Sufis, God draws the quintessence of what has been gained by existence back into the software of the universe as feedback. That's why Jalaluddin Rumi says, "Tonight the umpteen stars give birth to the life eternal." What he is saying is that which is ephemeral will become eternal. As we inhale we give vent to our need for freedom, because in order to extract the quintessence of what we have gained by life, which is wisdom, we need to give up the dross, to give up a lot of the contingent aspects. To put it more clearly, this could be illustrated by the extraction of perfume from a flower. The dross has got to be rejected so that we can just keep the essence. This is what we're experiencing.  Our need is not to give up the world but to try to extract the quintessence of the wisdom of what we've gained by our experience that will never die. It also means  letting go of those aspects of our life that confine and limit us.  
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That is what we have to look into very deeply. What does it mean exactly? Pir-o-Murshid said something that has been recorded in two ways and I'm not sure which is correct. One is "you loosen the ties," and the other is "you break through the ties." We need to look into those ties to see if they confine us externally, in a circumstantial way. You know we can be free in our spirit while bound in our circumstances. To free ourselves from circumstances would not be real freedom. Rather, we must ask, "How have I developed dependence upon conditions in my thinking and in my emotions?" That would be an addiction. "Can I, therefore, accept limitation in my circumstances while finding a way of freedom in my soul?" This is a thought that we are grappling with in our lives, the degree to which we find freedom, and the degree to which we are involved by our interests. 

On this subject Pir-o-Murshid is very, very clear. He says everything that has been gained in life is the result of interest. This is not the way of indifference, the way of the ascetic. He says, "The power that you gain by pursuing your interest will give you the ability to take upon yourself a greater challenge than you have taken on so far.

We gain in power by pursuing our purpose in life. For Murshid, the purpose in life is extremely important. How we handle situations and what we accomplish in life is very important. Then he says, "Your motivation does limit that power." If our motivation is for personal gain, for example, that certainly limits our power. The ultimate thing is for our motivation not to be personal, but for  service. If we can do that, then he says, that could be interpreted as being indifference or detachment, which is the way of the ascetic. The ideal is to be in life, to involve ourselves and yet somehow, in the depth of our soul, not to become dependent on the underpinning of the circumstances. I keep on repeating an idea of Shahabuddin who once said, "The support system takes over." That's exactly what happens to us in our lives, the support system takes over. For example, one might put so much energy into building the base camps for an Everest expedition that there is no energy and no money left to reach the top. That's what we're doing. 

This requires a lot of insight on our part. If we are a teacher, that is if we take responsibility to help guide people in their lives, we have to understand  the motivations of those people. We will have to have had those motivations in ourselves, so we're able to understand where those motivations come from. Then we've got to have found some kind of freedom. Otherwise we can't free other people from their dependence upon conditions. The conditions break down, so we've got to help people find some kind of immunity against disaster. That is the way of indifference, of detachment. This is a very subtle teaching. It cuts right into our problems.
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We need to be very careful when we do the breathing practices that we don't determine the inhaling and exhaling ourselves, that we don't cut in with our will. The way to avoid that is to think that the rhythm of our breath, the ebb and flow, is an expression of the ebb and flow of the total universe. Here we have this ebb and flow, Divine exhaling and Divine inhaling. If we do that, then our breathing can be much slower without forcing ourselves. 

We exhale and experience the descent of the total being, as us, into the cosmos in search of the fulfillment of Ishq Allah, a longing to bring heaven on earth, to make our dreams come true. We experience the nostalgia that is a basic drive behind our life. Just feel that nostalgia very deeply, that very deep nostalgia, what life means to us. Personal wishes are, perhaps, very inadequate expressions of our deep nostalgia, which we cannot define in words. If we can get in touch with our deeper feelings, then we realize what is really important for us. 

Then as we inhale, we can look upon our life, our situation. It's clear that in order to pursue our nostalgia, we had to involve ourselves in responsibilities which were constraining, and in relationships which represent some kind of curtailment of our freedom. We see how it is our understanding of that involvement that gives us a sense of freedom. Ultimately, what is important is our realization, how our realization can be affected by our lives, or how independent  our realization can be from the limitation of our circumstances.

Maybe we feel a need. It's not just a longing. It's an imperative, almost desperate, need for freedom. The more involved we are, the more imperative our need is. The whole of Buddhism was a quest for freedom. The message that Pir-o-Murshid announces is the message of spiritual freedom. We see that in general we involve ourselves in situations out of concern for personal freedom. There is chaos. That's a price we pay for the most valuable thing, which is freedom, except that, in general, the idea of freedom is misunderstood. Real freedom is to be able to pursue the purpose of our soul.  Our personal interests do not represent our freedom. In fact they represent confinement, a trap. We aren't free just to be able to follow our fantasies, our whims. That's not freedom. We are in search of the ultimate freedom. That will be enhanced as we inhale.  Buddha calls it freedom from conditioning. We are conditioned and we don't know it. That's why the Sufis say, "Oh man you are free. It's your ignorance of your freedom that is your captivity." It's not the external circumstances that confine us. It's not realizing our freedom. 

To be free in ourselves would mean that nobody can insult us, nobody can hurt us, nobody can grab us with their will - just like that woman in the South who was being lynched who said, "You can do what you like with my body, but you can't touch my soul." That's why the Muslims say that they never crucified Christ. All they grabbed was his body. Can we just feel what it's like to be free, free in our being? 
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One of the features of this freedom, that Pir-o-Murshid says is in the core of our being, is something like a mirror that cannot be stained by the impressions upon it. The immaculate core of our being is totally immune from our own guilt. It's the saving grace, the ultimate refuge against our dissatisfaction with ourselves. It's a mitigating factor that can turn the tables on the law, because grace is always an exception to the law. 

In this context, I think we are ready to look at our motivations. That is called muhasibi; we observe ourself as though we were another person, objectively, without personal bias, without efforts of justification or any kind of judgmental assessment whatever. It starts by asking ourselves very simple questions like,"Why am I doing what I'm doing?" The second question is, "What are my motivations in my relationship with another person? Is it something that I want to gain for what I think is my own well being, or what I consider the well being of that person, or is it an oath or whatever?" It's a matter of being very honest. Is there any manipulation there? Or is it absolutely up front? Muhasibi can be extended to dialogue between people, asking each other what we are expecting from the other, or expressing disappointment because our expectations were not met; but we have to be very clear as to what those expectations are. 

Then we have to ask ourselves the next question, which is much more difficult to answer. That is, "What is it that I value? What are the things in life that I prioritize over others?" In fact we could make a whole catalog of values, what is called a scale of values. "I like this, in fact I'm trying to pursue this thing that I delight in. It's true there is something else that I value more. If it came to having to make a choice, would I opt for the thing I value more? That is, would I sacrifice the thing I value less. If I'm not prepared to do that, then I cannot say the value I would have liked but have not pursued is a real value. It's fictitious because I can't implement it by my actions." That is what Pir-o-Murshid calls the ideal.  Pir-o-Murshid was very realistic when he said, "Shatter your ideal on the rock of truth." We can formulate all kinds of ideals, but I don't think they qualify as motivations unless we are prepared to make the sacrifice that is required to pursue them. They remain idyllic. 

This practice must be done without judgment. It's not, "I should be pursuing a higher ideal, but I'm not prepared to make the sacrifices." No, if we deny ourselves our personal wishes excessively, we will feel sorry for ourselves and will not have the joy we need in order to pursue our higher ideals. It's different for each person. We have to know exactly what balance to maintain between those ideals that we really wish to pursue and those personal needs that will keep us from being sorry for ourselves, and give us a certain amount of fulfillment. 
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The next step is the culmination: to see how our motivations are an expression of the Divine impulse towards manifestation. It is to feel that impulse, to become conscious of it moving us towards the fulfillment of our life's purpose, instead of being constrained within our personal identity. The way to do it is to think of ourselves as a funnel which includes the large end and the small end and all that is in between. 

There is no doubt that pursuing our ideal gives us what is called spiritual power, and confidence, and validation of our self-image. In fact it makes us into a hero. Pursuing our personal objective gives us a kind of personal power, it might be ruthless and merciless and can  lead to manipulation, causing a lot of suffering amongst victims of our whims, as we see in the history of the world. That's not power. It  can all of a sudden collapse when confronted with Divine power, or even when confronted with the truth, like some of the Nazi war criminals who were confronted with the commission of investigation. They started collapsing. They were very powerful, but their power didn't last. Christ did not relent when facing the power of Rome. 

I say this because, if we purport to be teachers, just giving guidance and understanding, that's not what people are ultimately looking for. We have to become a powerhouse upon which they build their houses. It's true that we're not teaching people to believe in this or that or the other thing;  but I think that once we have seen something, that's what is called realization, then our faith comes into the picture. Then we trust what we've seen. Ultimately our faith is what people are hanging onto in their disbelief. As Pir-o-Murshid describes it, it's like swimming, but we're swimming with a person who is floundering in the water. Not only do we have to be able to keep ourselves afloat, but we have to keep afloat that person who is a dead weight and not able to save him/herself. That's where our faith is being very much tapped by people of little faith. If we start doubting what our realization revealed, then we cause the person who is looking to us for our support to sink in the water. It is better not to undertake that project at all to start with.  When we realize that we embody the power of the hierarchy of the masters, saints, and prophets, we establish a connection. It gives us empowerment.

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Manifesting the Divine Qualities


Rather than asking, "What is the teaching?" I prefer to ask, "What are our problems, and what is it in the teaching that will help us to deal with these problems?" For this I use the words of the wazaif (the plural of wazifa). This word simply means repetition, reminiscence of whatever it is. The word we want is sifat. Sifat means qualities. These are labels in  a language which is foreign to most of us, and consequently, we don't project connotations upon them as we do with words in our own familiar language. Therefore, they can mean something different, which is beyond our understanding. It is a great mistake to try to understand what is the 'meaning' of the wazifa. That's what people ask,"What does it mean?" Then we get bogged down by the way our mind is limited by language. I much prefer translating the wazaif, sifat, in terms of forms. That's extremely important in Sufism. It's embodying states of consciousness. Embodying. That means in our body, incorporating in our body. Actually, to say it more precisely, rendering states of consciousness corporeal; so they get adamant in the configuration of the cells of the body. It does make a difference in the body. We have to consider our bodies in meditation, rather than seeking samadhi, where we are not conscious of our body at all, or not concerned about our body. 

We have all felt resentment. Deeper still than that is feeling distressed, and distress in general. We carry wounds in us, not only because of the past, but sometimes because of the present in an ongoing situation which is very painful. It is honest to recognize in ourselves that there is suffering and not force ourselves to be happy when it doesn't ring true. Also, in fact, we carry resentment. Much as I would like to be magnanimous, I must say, when I think of the woman who gave away my sister to the Nazis for 100 thousand francs, and the consequences it had, it's very difficult for me not to have resentment. How, then, can I teach forgiveness when it's a problem for me? My only answer is the words of Christ, "They do not know what they do." This makes it easier. They're children, they do not know what they're doing. They think they know what they are doing, but they don't. 

We must not limit ourselves by how we feel ourselves, but get into the consciousness of the other people. That's where the practices, the sifat - which apply to the expansion of consciousness are  a kind of medicine. What we do is try and get into the consciousness of a person who harmed us. For example, I've tried to get into the consciousness of the Nazi who beat my sister to death, and kicked her, and let her lie there bleeding throughout the night, and to forgive him, I don't think that's the issue. What I understand now is that they used psychopaths as jailers. Psychopaths would kill anyone anywhere. There are a lot of psychopaths all over Europe and in the U.S. who kill people just for the sake of, for the joy of, killing people. 
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They were used; their mental disease was used. It's very difficult to have a lot of resentment when I know maybe he was brought up by a stepfather who kicked him out of the house, and was drunk all the time, that kind of thing. The woman who gave Noor away, that was much worse. I'm talking about myself as an example. Probably we all have had experiences where we have been so badly maligned or badly abused, or badly treated by people, that we find it very stressful. We have a difficult enough time just being able to survive, without having to forgive people. It requires so much of us. The consequence is that we are the sufferers, because we carry the wounds in our hearts, and that stands in the way of our progress.  Sometimes we have to open up these wounds  and put disinfectant on them. 

That's part of going on retreat: we look at what we have in our experience now.  When people are doing individual retreats, all of a sudden all their problems surface. They find it very difficult to concentrate because these thoughts are compulsive. Then we say, "Well, you know, we should call for a psychotherapist because we don't have the expertise to deal with it."  I used to think like that; now I think what we're doing has some relevance to psychotherapy, but let us at least apply what we know. Let us see what light the esoteric traditions throw upon these situations. 

The first steps in Yoga consist in realizing that our assessment of our problems is false. That's what Yoga says. It's false, because it is biased. It's looked upon from a biased point of view. The next step is trying to not be limited by our personal assessment of our problems. To say that our point of view is biased and therefore wrong, is negative. What is the reality of the problem? Sufism does not discount our personal assessment of our problem. It is a valid point of view, but it's just one point of view, and it's got to be completed by other points of view. What spirituality is about is including a perspective wider than our commonplace perspective - wider and also higher  perspectives other than the commonplace. If we keep ourselves caught up in, jammed in our personal point of view, then of course we're turning round in circles, like a fly in a bottle - it doesn't know how to get out. That's where our practices have a very definite relevance in terms of psychology. 

What we suggest as a possible help is to extend consciousness, and do it systematically. We can really try and see things as they look from the point of view of another person. We can do it. There are two steps. One is to get into the consciousness, how another person looks upon our problems, the problems in which we're involved with that person. Then at least we understand. It's not a question of justifying. At least we understand, "Well that's the way that person sees. I see things differently." We tend to think that we are right and the other person is wrong, but we might be wrong and the other person might be right. At least we are confronting these two vantage points. 
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The second step is to see how we look from the point of view of the other person. The other person has what they call a self-image and we have our self-image. The other person has an image of us that's not us at all. Our self-image is not us either, so there are two errors here. We are spending our life in error. Just think, we are schlepping our misassessment of ourselves throughout our life, in our psyche. This is very serious. 

We encounter distress;  the wazifa for that is Daar, I am distressed. It makes it easier if we find we are sharing in the distress of the cosmic drama, instead of thinking, "This is my distress." There again, it's an expansion of consciousness that will do it. There are two stages. One is expansion of consciousness which tends to makes us lose our personal center, which is embodied in the word Basit. Then we find expansion of consciousness with some kind of containment, which is the word Wasi, which means to embrace, or to encompass. I prefer that, because we are not losing our notion of our personal center; rather we are extrapolating it with a wider notion of ourselves. What is more, we feel that these people are part of us; we are embracing them in our consciousness. That makes it easier to deal with distress. Distress tends to make us get constricted in our personal identity; whereas if we are thinking of the distress of humanity, or if we even just think of the sadness of people around us, the problems of people around us, then sometimes we realize how puny is our concern about ourselves. I just think of that little 11-year-old girl in Bosnia who had lost both arms. She can't wash herself, and she can't eat. We have our suffering, but just imagine how other people suffer. 

In fact, I think the only way to deal with - if we can call it dealing with - our problems, is to have a broken heart, to really feel broken about the suffering of people. Let us not think of ourselves as a therapist, saying "I want to help people." That gives us a certain pleasure. No, let us think, "I'm part of these people and I understand how they feel." We can only bring any kind of help for a person if we've gone through the same problems that they have gone through, and have somehow, not overcome them, but somehow found a way of living with them. What we find in the end is really love, because love breaks our heart. 

This is expanding our consciousness. There are cases where it's the other way around, it's turning within rather than expanding our consciousness. Expanding our consciousness thrusts a different perspective on a problem and the way it looks. Turning within really means reaching out from inside. It doesn't mean withdrawing, but reaching out from inside, inhaling, and exhaling.  

There are two wazaif. One is Batin and the other is Latif. It's good to associate those two. Batin, the veiled one, could be best illustrated by the feeling that we cannot express what we mean by the mediumship of language. We realize the degree to which our concern about expressing ourselves in words, that are inadequate anyway, tends to limit our thinking. In fact that's the reason for silence in a retreat. 
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We are so used to thinking in terms of words that even if we aren't speaking we might be called upon to speak at any time. Whereas on a retreat we are not at all concerned about expressing our thoughts in words. The consequence is we are able to start discovering levels of thinking, depths of thinking, that we had never suspected at all. We had no idea what was going on in the depth of our mind. That that would be the best indication of what we mean by turning within.

The condition that is most conducive to turning within is as we inhale. We are continually ingesting and digesting, not just the physical world in our food, but psychological impressions in our psyche, rather in the same way as our bodies do with our food. These impressions could be like walking in the street, or talking to a person, or TV, or radio, anything that accrues to us from outside, that leaves an impression upon our psyche. Then our psyche needs to digest it. We ingest all kinds of food. We might have indigestion if we have taken the wrong food, or more food than we can digest. We are suffering from real psychological 'indigestion' in our lives at present. The consequence is imbalance, and pathological mental states, and chaos. The degeneration in our times is really frightful. 

Therefore we have meditation. The technique in meditation consists in placing sentinels, first of all, at the doors of perception. That is the word of Buddha. I would say lines of defense in the psyche that act as sentinels. We have the ability to select those impressions that we can digest, that we can handle. It does not mean we should be judgmental about those which are too difficult to handle. We can say, "For the moment I'm not big enough to handle all this. So I give priority to those that I can digest." We find those we can digest are those which are in resonance with our being. For example, the music we like resonates with our kind of attunement. 

That is based on the immune system. The immune system is based upon me or not me. The organism knows when an organ is too different from its DNA, and rejects it. We also have the second immune system, whereby the immune system adapts itself to the environment. The same mechanism operates in our psyche. We are suffering from an overly developed sense of adaptation. Consequently we lose our uniqueness. How do we reject an impression that we cannot digest? First of all we identify it by saying, "Well, I don't feel comfortable with this." Maybe reject is not the proper word. Maybe it's better to say to not admit, to not accept, to not give entrance to an impression. The best way to do this is detachment. There is no doubt about it. It's the way of the ascetic. And it's really wonderful that we are able to introduce the way of the ascetic right in the middle of life. When we do this practice, we alternate between exhaling, discovering the way that we are enthused with life and involve ourselves with life, and inhaling, discovering detachment, and freedom - not from the world and situations - but inside ourselves, in our thinking and our emotion. Finding that we have enough freedom in ourselves to be able to discount an impression that we cannot handle will give us a  sense of rightness. It's not rejecting it in that sense, or rejecting it in any way. For the time being, we cannot deal with it all.
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Another factor is our ability to transmute. In fact that is what we are doing with our food. We reject perfunctorily those ingredients in our food that we can't digest, or are difficult to digest. The amino acid chains of the food that we ingest are broken down by enzymes from the pancreas and the liver, and the RNA turns the individual amino acids into proteins that are incorporated in our bodies. The same thing is true of the psychological impressions from the outer world. We have to break them down and see how they connect up with our idiosyncrasies. Otherwise, we would be carrying all this undigested 'food' in our psyches and we would become very confused. This is the condition of many people. I think psychotherapists encounter this situation. They are often dealing with people who don't know how to digest their impressions, and consequently get very confused. As a matter of fact, cancer seems to be in some way connected with the body's difficulty in transcribing the DNA and RNA because of over stress. 

Also, and psychologists are right here, I think that we have to have a very strong sense of who we are. That's what the immune system is built on, a sense of "who I am," that is, my likes and dislikes. I prefer Bach to hard rock - that's me. Other people prefer hard rock to Bach - that's them. Each one of us has a very strong sense of,"this is me." That's why we start with muhasibi, which is looking very clearly into ourselves to see what we really value, because "that is me." What I value is me. The only way to avoid fooling ourselves, or deluding ourselves, or deceiving ourselves is to ask ourselves, "What am I prepared to do to pursue that value?" If we are not prepared to do whatever is necessary, it's not a real value. It's platonic, an ideal, and Pir-o-Murshid says, "Shatter your ideal on the rock of Truth." The condition for doing this is to be very, very honest with ourselves, and to recognize that we have personal needs, and we have ideals, and we have values. We must learn to tell the difference between what are our values, what we think are our values, what are our motivations, and what are our personal needs. To what extent are we able to give vent to these different needs, and to what extent are we prepared to sacrifice a personal need to prioritize a value? I think we all go through this. There is not judgment about it. We go through a process and we are transformed. Life transforms us, but it's good to be very clear as to where we are at. Muhasibi, turning within, shows us that there are a lot of implications in that word Batin. I would associate Batin with Haqq, with truth. Ya Batin - ya Haqq. 

If we start turning within as we're doing in meditation, the first thing is that we tend not to be aware of our surroundings. If we are aware of our surroundings, we have a guilt feeling like, "I shouldn't be aware of my surroundings." That is a wrong way of thinking. I would say we should be aware of our surroundings, because if we're not, that's when we pass out. That's when we have this break in our consciousness. 
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In the previous section we looked at the body from the way that the template, or matrix, configures the atoms. That applies to our surroundings too. If we look at the lotus flowers from underneath, from the roots, we get the sense of how the cosmos configures itself into individual flowers. We downplay our attention to the environment. 

I remember being part of a test. It was either at the Menninger Institute or at Swami Rama's place. They were trying to see if I could have delta waves and at the same time be aware of a conversation around me. We can be in an alternate state of consciousness and at the same time be conscious at the physical level, which is not samadhi. That's what I suggest, that we turn within. We downplay the physical environment. It's okay if we hear the sounds of the cars in the street and people walking by. It's okay as long as our consciousness is like a beam. Then the psyche is like a screen. The beam lights up the middle of the screen, but there is also the periphery, the twilight. If a thought emerges, or an impression from the outside world, we tend to move the beam towards that impression. The secret of meditation is to keep our attention on the center of the screen. Then we're aware of what's happening in the twilight, but we don't turn our attention away from the center. 

Our next concern is that we find ourselves exposed to the onrush of all kinds of random thoughts. We might come to the conclusion that we're not the 'meditative type' because we just can't deal with these impressions. Everyone does that. It's okay. There are two methods. One is to keep our attention and to avoid shifting our glance. In Islam, during the prayer, we keep our glance straight ahead. We don't turn left or right. It's the same thing. The other method is a real insight into the process of thinking. I'm not talking about thoughts. I'm talking about the process of thinking. Thoughts are abstractions. They are static words, whereas thinking is dynamic. We can discern the difference between the peripheral areas of thinking and the deeper areas of thinking. In the peripheral areas of thinking, there is an overlap, a spill-over with the psychological environment. Our thoughts are regurgitating impressions of the environment. 

There are grades of thinking as we go deeper and deeper, moving from that peripheral mode of thinking to what we might call thoughts emerging from within, ex nilo, out of nothing, creative thoughts. That is what Sufism, and Buddhism as well, are trying to highlight. Buddha distinguishes between our different minds.  I'm opening a parenthesis here, but I think it's really necessary  to know this because it will help in our meditation. It has helped me certainly. This is theory of course, but we exist on several levels. We are a many-tiered being. The Tibetans say the mind rides the wind. The wind is energy. Our body is energy. Our subtle body is another, more subtle form of energy. Then there is our very subtle body. 
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To every level of identity, whether we identify with our body or our subtle body or our celestial body, there is a mode of thinking. If we're sitting here meditating, and we're absolutely identified with our body, our thinking is what the Tibetans call the gross mind. The gross mind is interpreting our experience of the environment, whether it's physical or psychological.  Yoga says it's maya, it's illusory. I would say that it's a valid point of view, but it is a limited point of view. It needs to be completed by other points of view. Therefore the art of turning within is to shift our sense of identity. It's no use just working with our mind,  thinking of ourselves as a subtle body. We must become aware of our subtle body, and identify with it. 

We feel an area of magnetism around our body. Then we can feel it also within our body. At first we can feel it above our head, in front of our heart center. It's unstable, rather like steam. In comparison, the body is rather stable, whereas this is kind of shifting, like a balloon. It's vibrating very fast, so it's a very different feeling. It would be dangerous to discount our body and simply identify with our subtle body. I suggest we think of our subtle body as a template of our physical body, so we are still able to be aware of our physical body, but it seems to be like the outer manifestation, at the surface of life, of a deeper reality which is our subtle body. That's only the subtle body. It's not yet the celestial body. 

When we're meditating we find that our way of thinking is different. What would be the difference? When we're meditating, we have to know what's happening. Otherwise we're confused. There are all kinds of unconnected thoughts coming in. 

This is theory, but we have to know it when we're meditating. In our ordinary thinking we think in categories, what they call discrete thoughts - the categories of reason of Emanuel Kant, the German philosopher. It's a certain way of thinking. This tree is there. That tree is there. This is the commonplace way of thinking. This person is here, I am this person, and so on. We're not only thinking in categories, but we're thinking in terms of causality - this happened because it resulted from that - what is called a causal chain. "This happened to me because I did that in the past, so I have bad karma, and so I have to repair the bad karma," so on and so forth. That's the most elementary way of thinking. Our interpretation of our problems is in the mode of this rather commonplace way of thinking. "Yes, I can see that I made a mistake and now I'm suffering from that mistake." I don't say it's wrong. It's true; but it's only one point of view. 

What would be the comparison when we identify with our subtle body? That's where we bring in the word Latif, subtle.  Batin, Latif, subtle. That is what in computer language is called parallel thinking, a concatenation of causes, synchronicity. This is worthwhile to approach. I don't see why spirituality has to exclude clear understanding. In fact, spirituality is clear understanding. Why do people think,"This is too intellectual. This is above my head. Pir Vilayat is on a mind trip. So it's not for me. I'll go to see Rajneesh." Really, why not take up the challenge? Just let us see what Jung means by synchronicity. There are concurrences of situations that cannot be accounted for by causality - parallel causes. 
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When we're turning within, all of a sudden we think it's intuition. To be quite clear about it, we see a connection between things that we could not have seen in our ordinary way of thinking. It was, again, Jung who said,"If you do not deal with your shadow, it will come to you in the form of your fate." He saw that connection, whereas many of us might say, "I don't know why God is so unfair to me. I have such a very bad fate in my life. Everything goes wrong." We don't like to think that we are causing it ourselves. We don't see the connection. I don't say we are causing it ourselves. It's not causal. It's some kind of concatenation between causes. We're seeing relationships of meaningfulness which we couldn't see otherwise. That's the reason mystics speak a language which people can't understand; because it doesn't fit into the commonplace way of thinking. 

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Balancing Our Energies

We've been talking a lot about our problems, so that we're able to look at them at a certain distance, and meditate without having a split in our constitution. We've talked about the extrasamsaric matrix, or rather several matrices that are an upward pull upon our commonplace identity.  What we want to do is to awaken those levels, those counterparts of ourselves, so we become aware of them, and also be able to fashion them. 

I talk about a level of subtle body, we can feel it, almost like steam, or like a magnetic force, a kind of energy. It is very difficult to define, but as long as we feel it, that's the important thing. We can distinguish in this energy field,an energy that is grosser - a lot of amperage and not so much voltage, and then an energy that's the other way around - a lot of voltage and not much amperage. We can just feel, when we concentrate on the top of the head, that the energy seems to be very fine as compared with the energy at the bottom of the spine.  There are relays between them, which are called the chakras, and there's a transit from one pole to the other. 

One way of what we call lifting consciousness through the planes - lifting is not the proper word, but it's the word that's used -  is to shift our identity not just from bodiness to subtle body, but to different energy levels of the subtle body. That is done by transferring our attention from one chakra to the next as we inhale, and then holding our breath, and then again, doing the opposite, descending through the chakras as we exhale. The opposite is not what the alchemists call materialization of spirit, instead of spiritualization of matter. I think of it in terms of what we do with light - light upon light - the quickening action of pure spirit upon our subtle body, even though spirit is, perhaps, the apex of our subtle body.

There are four wazaif -sifat  - which we should review.  Muid, a kind of resilience at the bottom of the spine, moving up to Quddus, pure spirit, at the top of the head. We can distinguish those two poles of energy.  Then Muhyi,  which is like a new energy dispensation of energy that surfaces from the solar plexus, and then Hayy, which is energy radiating from the heart center.  It is good to be aware of those four manifestations of energy, modes of energy, before we undertake the practices that we're going to do now, because it gives us a clear orientation.  

By referring to these four modes of energy, we have a sense of up-down, ascending-descending, and then from inside toward outside: centrifugal, and outside toward inside: centripetal. The subtle body is like a vortex, and vortex is a very good word, because it is continually in motion. There are currents. The practice of the Dhikr enhances the circulation of these currents if we identify with the subtle body.  We can prepare ourselves for this with a practice called Kasab. 

We have practiced the actual confection of the structure of this subtle body, especially the face.  Now we want to enhance all that energy, and the currents.  All this is a preparation for what we're going to do.  (Remember, gross body, gross mind, subtle body, subtle mind, and then very subtle body, very subtle mind.)  Now we are working with the subtle body and of course the subtle mind, the creative mind, that translates impinging thoughts into form, and by the same token fashions our subtle body.  
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As we move ahead, we shall encounter the very subtle body, our celestial counterpart of light, then the very subtle mind, which is neither the understanding that interprets events nor the creative thoughts that are invested as forms, but a kind of direct knowledge that is already inherent in us, but which is awakened, and which the Sufis call therefore "revealed."  That is a good orientation from here - a sense of how we're doing this, because just breathing in and out, that won't do it.  

We place the thumb of our right hand under our chin and the middle finger on our right nostril, and the back of our left hand on the palm of our right hand, and the thumb of our right hand in the proximity of our left nostril.  First of all, we breathe out through both nostrils.  Now we press with our right finger and inhale directly in our left nostril.  We hold our breath, turning our eyeballs upward, and curling our tongue to press  up on our palate.  We exhale through the right nostril. The energy of pure spirit, Quddus, descends on the right side of our spinal cord.  We inhale through the right nostril. Muid, the inertia energy, ascends up the right channel of our spinal cord.  We hold our breath, eyeballs upward, tongue curled, pressed against the palate, pure spirit, Quddus, and we exhale left.  The energy of pure spirit descends on the left channel of the spinal cord.  It adumbrates the energy at the bottom of the spine which is a lot of amperage and not so much voltage.  Now we inhale through the left nostril, and consciously transmute that gross energy with a lot of amperage as we are ascending into very fine energy, Quddus.  We hold our breath, eyeballs upwards, curled tongue pressing against the palate, thinking of pure spirit, and exhale through the right, so that this very fine energy descends and not only adumbrates but permeates the energy all the way down - light upon light.  

Now we inhale through both nostrils, and concentrate on the energy that rises in the middle channel of the spinal cord.  We turn our eyeballs upward, and hold our breath.   As we exhale the energy of pure spirit descends passing from one chakra to the next, but it keeps on bifurcating, right and left, entering the lateral channels.  Once more, we inhale through both nostrils and concentrate on the central channel.  We hold the breath, and this very fine energy descends in the central channel and gets bifurcated right and left.
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We have enhanced the flow of these currents of energy.  They also correspond to the transmission of energy along the three trunks of the spinal cord.  The central nervous system is governed by a whole system of nerves found within our spinal cord.  Along the right and left, are two lateral channels that govern the autonomic functions, physical functions that we don't have to think about, like breathing, circulation of the blood, heart beat, digestion, and so on. There is also a relationship between the nervous system and the psyche.  

Yoga is based upon the principle that there is no autonomic function that cannot be taken over by the conscious will, and that there is no mental function that cannot be taken over by the central nervous system.  That includes functions in the brain.  The ancient Hindus disected bodies, corpses, and knew a lot about these nerve connections, nothing like we know today, of course.  The principle they were working with is this.  If we are learning how to play the piano, or to type, or drive a car. First, we do the movements that are intended, and therefore it involves our will, and therefore the activities of the central nervous system.  Somehow, that habit that we've set up is going to be relayed to the autonomic nervous system, so eventually, we don't have to think of how we use our fingers or whatever. The autonomic nervous system takes over.  We have trained the autonomic nervous system.  (By doing wazaif, we are training the unconscious)  The point is that if we keep on, and if a mistake keeps setting in, we keep on repeating the same old mistake, because it's become automated. Therefore, we have to redo that action which was automated consciously, and repeat it several times. Then the autonomic nervous system will take it over and do it automatically without our having to think of it.  What we are really enhancing is the connection between the autonomic nervous system and the central nervous system and the afferent and efferent nerves to which it's connected.  

The practice we are doing now is going to enhance that interaction between the autonomic nervous system and the central nervous system. If we think of our subtle body as a vortex, then the center of the vortex is a vacuum. The center of our spinal cord, which will correspond to the trunk of the CNS, the main trunk, operates a kind of suction effect upon the periphery. What the Tibetans call the wind is sucked into the center from the periphery. The way to do it, is to imagine a flame in the center of the spinal cord.  

Now the opposite is true. When we're exhaling, then we're bringing the energy down - the quickening of the holy spirit - which ascends through the fontanel and descends through the central channel and keeps on being bifurcated left and right, so we are enhancing the control of the central nervous system over the autonomic nervous system.  In the first place, we are relaying information from the autonomic system to the central nervous system that takes over and controls the autonomic.  The practice that we do has definite consequences in terms of the configuration of our nerves. We think of the whole circuitry of the nerves as a hologram.  It acts holistically, not just in terms of circuits.  
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It's easier to explain in terms of the electromagnetic field. If we imagine our body is like a magnet, we can feel the field around that magnet.  At school most of us had a magnet, and we poured metal filings around the magnet and  found they were configured in a certain shape, which is the shape of the configuration of the field of that magnet.  This is exactly what happens in our body, and we can actually feel it.  That gives us a sense of what our subtle body is.  Now, the magnet is static, but our body is dynamic, so it's not a static magnetic field, but a dynamic electric field, in which our currents of electricity conform to the law of Gauss, who says that if our right hand is a magnetic coil, that whirls in the direction our fingers go (to the left), we would be enhancing the electric current in our thumb. 

Our electomagnetic field is part of the electromagnetic field of the planet, but still it is like a vortex within the lake, which has its own kind of identity.  If we are sitting, particularly if we are sitting cross legged, then at the bottom of our spine, there is a threshold mode, which is called muladahara chakra,  where the exchange between the two fields is particularly felt.  That's why the yogis attach so much importance to the snake that is coiled or the two snakes that are coiled at the bottom of the spine, called kundalini. If, while we are breathing in, we consciously represent mentally to ourselves the way those snakes are going to coil upwards if we awaken them - as in the cadeuceus - then we will enhance the spiraling of this energy.

We are sitting cross legged, and we can feel what we call telluric energy, earth energy.  The bottom pole of that magnet is our body.  If we breathe in through the left nostril, the energy that impinges upon our body, at the bottom of the spine, is going to be drawn to our left. That energy is going to keep on being sucked in by the vacuum in the center of our spinal cord, the center of the vortex, and so its going to spiral instead of going up straight.  Its going to spiral in front of us, and then toward our right, and back, and keep on like that, clockwise.  Spiral means it is going to ascend and at the same time, turn.  Now, we hold our breath.  The energy is now going to be directed to our pituitary gland.  We've arrested the upward flow.  Then we exhale through the right nostril. We have two poles, the bottom of the spine where the snakes are, and the top of the head, the fontanel. The opposite of telluric energy is very fine energy, the christening of the holy spirit - Quddus - that now spirals down, as we breathe through our right nostril. We imagine these two spiral staircases that crisscross; then we realize that we do not descend on the same spiral staircase on which we came up.  

Now we inhale through the left nostril, then we spiral, we whirl the telluric energy, the earth energy which impinges on the bottom of our spine. We whirl it anti-clockwise, and eventually the flow is stopped by the fact that we stopped breathing through our left nostril, so it settles in the pituitary. We hold our breath, and then we exhale it through the right nostril.  Now, as we inhale through the right nostril we are ascending on the same staircase we just went down.  Now we exhale through the left nostril.  Pure energy, or energy of pure spirit, descends in a spiral anticlockwise on the same staircase that we ascended in the first place.  We have two staircases that crisscross.
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If we inhale through both nostrils,  then we have two spirals, as in the cadeuceus, that are going to crisscross in front of the second chakra, behind the solar plexus, in front of the heart center, behind the throat center (called the atlas) in front of the third eye, and eventually meet in the pituitary gland, which the Hindus call bindu  in the center of the chakra. 

We have two spirals of energy where the peripheral rims are being sucked into the center, being drawn upwards, and being transmuted as they move upwards.  The effect upon the other systems, is extremely pertinent because the information in the autonomic nervous system is being fed into the central nervous system and reaches the brain. These are nerves, these are neurotransmitters, communicating this information, not just energy, but information, because the mind drives the wind.  It is moving in and up. As we exhale, then, through both nostrils, the energy descends in the central nervous system and is relayed to the autonomic nervous system.  I call it bifurcating, right and left, two spirals.  The important moment is when the two spirals meet. Of course they meet not only at the bottom of the spine and at the top of the head, but also at each chakra.  So we're awakening the activity of those chakras, awakening that latent energy of the autonomic nervous system. We doing something to our body, awakening faculties that are not normally active.

Remember to turn our eyeballs upwards, even as we are breathing in, and to curl our tongue, pressing the tip against our palate, particularly when we hold our breath.  We turn our eyes to a horizontal position as we exhale, and relax our tongue. 

Remember the adage of the Tibetans, "the mind drives the wind."  These currents, called the wind, have the effect of shifting our mode of thinking from the gross mind, to the subtle mind, and then to the very subtle mind, and eventually beyond that, into what is called the clear light of bliss.  

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The Doors of Perception

t's always very difficult to speak while being in a state and trying to  be able to cross the threshold between turning within and communicating with the outside. It would be much simpler to follow the traditional way, which is simply to cut out the environment altogether, and any memory of the environment, and just turn within. Call a sabbatical, and then we find ourselves back into life again. It's like opening one door, and closing it, and opening another. It doesn't make sense to me. What we are doing is much more subtle. That's because if we expose ourselves to the past, we fail to see the hope of the future. We're bogged into a vantage point in which there is a lot of disturbance, which calls upon our anger, perhaps even desire for revenge - vengeance against people who cause so much hurt against innocent victims. It seems like we are just ignoring this in order to just enjoy beatitude, perfect bliss. On the other hand, we can't help by simply reacting. 

This is a great art, knowing how to filter impressions so that we don't ignore them. There are two aspects to filtering. One is the grosser way - we find this in the first step of alchemy - which is sorting out things like the gross and the finer, and so on, rejecting those impressions we can't deal with. An example in my case is hard rock. I can't deal with it. I don't go to hard rock concerts. I prefer Bach. That's me. Maybe there are some people that feel differently about it. In my case there is a rejection of something. Maybe it's judgmental, but I hope it is not. I hope it is just something I feel I can't handle. It's the same thing with our food. There is something we can't digest, so we don't eat it. When we're meditating, we find there are thoughts and emotions that are disturbing. The only way to reject them, to repel them, is by enlisting the forces of detachment in our being. We have that in us. In the course of a retreat, this kind of function in the human being is enhanced. It's called viragaya in India, detachment. I illustrate it by the mirror at the core of our being that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it - a kind of immunity. The immune system of the physical body is based upon 'me' and 'not me.' The body will accept an organ that is similar, with DNA that is very close, but not too different. In the same way our psyche has the ability to reject impressions that are too unfamiliar. On the other hand, there is a second immune system which adapts itself so that the body can adopt an organ  that does not quite correspond to the DNA. Or we eat food which doesn't correspond to the DNA of our bodies. We suffer from indigestion of impressions we can't digest.

In a retreat, these impressions will come through stronger than ever before, because we're not busy. Therefore, this is the time to call upon that faculty that we have in ourselves to repel impressions that are undesirable for us at this moment. We have that faculty. It's just that we have to discover it. 
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It gives us a wonderful sense of freedom because we involve ourselves with situations and people at the cost of our freedom. Sometimes we think that to find our freedom, we need to free ourselves from those circumstances. Actually, it's not the circumstances that are constraining, it is our way of thinking and our way of emoting. A vagabond is not free, a hobo is not free. S/he is free from circumstances, but not free in his/her being. In a retreat we discover the longing of our soul for freedom. Do not misinterpret it as longing for freedom from the world. That's what a lot of people do when they leave and become an ascetic. It's freedom in our opinion, that is, our assessment of our problems. 

Think of our problems. It's no use my saying our assessment is wrong. Think of the way we assess our problems, thinking to ourselves, "What if my assessment is wrong?" For example, "As long as I'm in this relationship, I'll never be able to attain illumination." We are convinced, and suppose we are wrong. Suppose that it is just within these constraining circumstances that we can develop qualities which we would not develop if circumstances were more favorable. Misassessment. Freedom from our assessment of our problems. See how it feels. Every degree of freedom that we gain is like a paean of joy, that wonderful relief in our emotions from the compellingness of opinion. "I'm free." And that's what we need to do in a retreat - find freedom.

Then there is freedom from emotion. We become obsessed by a personal emotion to such an extent that we can't get ourselves out of it. We are caught in a trap. Somehow, this emotion is linked with our notion of ourselves. If we are very limited in our sense of who we think we are, which is not what we are, but what we think we are. The emotions we are experiencing are related to our sense of ourselves as a limited person. We need to discover the cosmic dimensions of our person, because our self-image is not us, it's a notion we have that is a distorted representation of only a fraction of the totality of our being. We get caught up in the distortion. It is still negative to say, "It's wrong; it's a missassessment." The positive thing would be to start sensing the vastness of our being. Just imagine the depth of our being, the virtualities, the latencies are infinite. Only very little of it comes through to the surface in what is called our personality. Our personality is not really us. It is that which is the outcome of this enormous pool of possibilities that is really us, but they are still in a latent condition. What I'm saying is theory of course, but we can do it. The way to do it is to think, "I could be." "I could be full of joy," or "I could be much more masterful," or "I could be much more truthful," or "I could be more compassionate," or "I could have more love," and so on. It's there. It is in us. It's something that we could be. It is in us; we could be it. It just has to surface.
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The negative is, "I'm not what I think I am." It does not help very much to know we're not what we think we are. Discovering what we could be is positive. We suffer from modesty, from an inverted form of pride. That is, we pride ourselves in our modesty. "I'm no good. I'm not up to much," and so on. The Sufis say, "God is offended by your criticizing his creation in you." It's not accepting the Divine gift. Just imagine the joy of being free from our self-image, realizing that it was deluding, and demeaning, and constraining. 

The latencies in us are called upon by matching them with what accrues to us from outside.  For example, we may have developed, so far, a certain degree of compassion, but this compassion is, after all, limited. There are limits to our compassion. Then we come across someone who is extremely compassionate, and that awakens our compassion. Not only do we have infinite potentialities within our being, but our personality, in which these qualities have not surfaced altogether, enriches itself by ingesting - just like food - the environment of the psyche. It matches what is already in us and it activates that which is already in us.

The trouble is unless we are very clear, we expose ourselves to all kinds of impressions, some of which are very deleterious, which damage our psyche because we can't handle them. This is where we have to learn detachment, indifference. The way to do it is to have a very strong sense of "this is me," and "that impression is too different from me.  I can't deal with it." We need a very strong sense of "me," like the basis of the immune system. We start by asking ourselves, "What are the things I like? What are my values?" That's us. That gives us a very clear sense of "me." If these impressions call upon some response in me, and I pursue them, and they are too much out of sync with what I am, then I fail to unfurl the potentialities of my being. Therefore our indifference is a protection. That is the way of the ascetic, detachment. That's why I said to surround ourselves with a zone of silence.

This is very difficult to do in life, but in a retreat we have the opportunity. Eventually we become so used to this that we'll be able to apply it in our daily life. Furthermore, even if these impressions are allowed to pass through the control of the defense system, the sentinels, as Buddha calls them, at the doors of perception, we turn our eyes away from what we don't want to see. A horrible film is on TV. We turn it off. That's radical, the first, the outer line of defense is radical, rejecting altogether. Then, those impressions that have not been stopped by the sentinels, that have come through somehow into the psyche, encounter defense systems within our psyche. The inner core of our psyche is very vulnerable and very subtle. The outer core is tougher. Sometimes the Sufis consider it to be like a nut, which has a hard shell and a soft center instead of an apricot, for example, that has a soft outside and a hard core inside. The defenses stop impressions; they've already entered into our psyche, but they are filtered a little bit. If they are able to reach very deep into our psyche, then of course they become very disturbing. 
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Our defense is now the thought  of the mirror that cannot be tarnished; but there is another thought, which is illustrated by the voice of Caruso that can be retrieved from its distorted registrations, the way it was registered many years ago. The voice was distorted, but somehow the real voice is present within its distortion. Therefore we think that our real being is there within the distortion. We may feel here are a lot of things in us we don't like, and we feel that life has extracted a toll from us, and that we've been damaged, and somehow defiled, tarnished. That may be, but the immaculate state of our being is still there within its distortions. We mustn't think it's there in the depth and the distortion is at the surface. No, it is intermeshed. It's right there. Consequently, as we hold our breath, if we identify ourselves with that core of our being, it has the faculty of correcting the distortion, reversing the distortion. That's the way they recovered the voice of Caruso. We reverse the distortion. That gains further and further. It spreads into our psyche, and reaches the periphery of our psyche. The void, sunyata, is a very misleading term. Let us say that the immaculate state is a kind of inertia. That means however much it has been disturbed, it will return to its pristine state.

So you see we are placing the accent on viragaya, a kind of immunity built into our very being. If we become aware of it, we are  even able to cleanse the defilement that has taken place due to the spillover of the environment. Amongst the first stages of a retreat is a catharsis. This is a further aspect of it. 

Most of our thinking is reactive. Situations trigger off a response in us. We're not enlisting all the resourcefulness in our being by simply reacting. In the first stage of a retreat, we place a buffer between ourselves and the environment. It could be quite radical. When we place our fingers on our senses in the practice which is called shaghal, or yoni mudra, we are doing something very radical. We are definitely cutting out the impressions of the environment. This has a dramatic effect on the consciousness, that turns within. We are creating conditions that are conducive to the emergence of purely spontaneous thoughts that are not reactive, and we call them creative. Those thoughts will never emerge if our minds are busy reacting to the impressions of the environment. Even if we try to be creative, it doesn't work. There are, however, methods that we're going to use in order to enhance our creativity. 

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The Practice Behind the Practice


When we are in a high state it is difficult to do a practice.  It seems like coming down. The practices help us get into a high state, but if we are already in that state it seems redundant to do the practice, and indeed we need to stop doing the practice because it's going to hold us back. It's much  more important to see how the practices work than how to do the practice. It's much more subtle than one would think.

I used to visit Pablo Cassals in 1936 in Spain, before the revolution. He used to play scales to start with and it was only after many hours that he really started playing. We could consider the practices like  scales. Even the 'cello suites of Bach were really intended as practices. Of course they can be played with very deep feeling even though they are intended as practices. In the same way  we can do our practices not in a perfunctory way, because they were prescribed to us, but with our whole being put into them. Then something will result which is much more important than just doing the practice.

Kasab, the breathing practice which we discussed in the chapter on "Balancing Our Energies" was prescribed by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, and has its origin in Yoga.  It is exactly what I have been describing. The kind of energy that is transmuted is supposed to carry our consciousness upwards.  Be careful of these words because it is not really upwards, but since we pass one chakra after the next and the higher chakras  are higher in the body, we have a sense that it's pulling us upwards. What we do with Kasab is see if the practice can trigger off insight in us. We realize that there are different modes of thinking, so while we are doing this practice we shift our thinking as we're moving from one chakra to the next.  When concentrating on the solar plexus, remember that it corresponds to the subtle body, and to that mode of thinking which we call creative thinking; it's spontaneous, not a reaction to the environment. When we concentrate on our heart center, then it is the celestial, very subtle, body that is invoked. When we transfer our attention to the throat center, it corresponds to Jabbarut,  the meaning of which is, ideally, not limited by language. At the level of understanding which can never be expressed in words we encounter Jabbarut. It's a kind of inborn realization we have which does not rest upon experience.

At this level we have to forego experience because it won't serve any purpose anymore. We have to get into our own intuitive understanding without needing some kind of proof.  That's why al Hallaj says, "At this point I don't need any proof anymore."
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The third eye is an insight which absolutely has nothing to do with language at all. That is the level of the programming, the intention, the archetypes, Lahut.  I know that what I'm saying now seems like a system. I simply want to draw our attention to the fact that while we are doing this practice we shift not just our mode of thinking, but our realization from one level to another. Ibn Arabi says, "At this point, God reveals to you the meaning of His names," and those meanings are not the meanings that we have learned, but the Divine meanings of the names. We try to understand what the wazaif mean, but this is God disclosing to us what they mean from His/Her point of view. Anfari, a wonderful dervish, says we are trying to reach God, and we are separated by a veil, and at a certain point we are at the other side of that veil. God is no longer the object of our cognizance. Finally of course we reach the apex, the sense of unity beyond diversity. 

There are two ways to do the practice. The Sufi way is to do three breaths left, hold our breath, exhale right three times; then inhale three times right, hold, exhale left; and then breathe in through both nostrils. The Yoga way is to breathe in through the left nostril, hold the breath, breathe out through the right nostril, then breathe in through the right nostril, hold the breath, and breathe out through the left; keep on alternating three times and then breathe in through both nostrils, hold the breath, and breathe out through both nostrils. We have the choice between the two and what I would suggest is to try them and see how they work. I find I prefer the Hindu way, which is alternating left and right. 

This is particularly pertinent because at the second stage we realize that the earth energy impinges upon our body through the bottom of the spinal cord. If we are breathing through the left nostril this energy is going to be pulled toward the left. Then it will spiral up clockwise. When we exhale this very high energy spirals down clockwise. When we inhale through the right nostril the energy is spiraling anti-clockwise, ascending on the same staircase we just came down. When we exhale then that very high level of energy, which we call pure spirit, Quddus, spirals downward, anti-clockwise on the same spiral staircase upon which we first ascended. When we breathe in through both nostrils, the energy at the bottom of the spine bifurcates left and right, in two spirals that criss-cross in front of the second chakra, in back of the solar plexus, in front of the heart center, in back of the throat center, in front of the third eye, and link up in either the pituitary or the fontanel.  (There are the different theories about that.)  When we exhale through both nostrils the energy descends in the central channel, but bifurcates left and right. Our energy field is like a vortex. There is a void in the center of the vortex - a vacuum - and so there is a flow into that void, The void absorbs the water of the whirlpool; it's being drawn  inside. The reason the energy spirals is because of the pull of the vacuum at the center of the spinal cord; otherwise it would rise up straight. While we are inhaling the spiral keeps on ascending and being drawn towards the center of the spinal cord. As we exhale, the energy descends in the center and moves outwards at the same time.
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 The effect is that our consciousness is drawn upwards while being drawn inside. In other words we turn within and we lift ourselves in the transcendental dimension at the same time. We have been studying the cosmic dimension as we exhale, and turning within as we inhale. Then we were studying the way energy moves upwards as we inhale, but now in this practice it is moving in, toward the inside, and upward at the same time.

When we exhale it's the other way around: moving down and outward at the same time. The criss-crossing of the spirals will activate, and in fact awaken the chakras. It is like striking a gong so it starts vibrating. We are enhancing functions in our body that are not normally active and which serve as the underpinning of our consciousness. This is very technical, like becoming a musician. There must be a lot of feeling and emotion, but there must also be a good technical basis, so we practice. We are training our body to serve as an underpinning for our realization. We are awakening faculties in our bodies that match the faculties in our mind.

We always exhale before starting, and really concentrate on that spiral of energy. We must also be aware of the difference between the gross energy at the bottom of the spine as compared to the very fine energy at the  top of the head, and how that energy is transmuted as it rises. Feel how the energy flows upwards and inwards at the same time, and passes through these nodes that are the chakras. The spirit discovers itself through matter and matter is made conscious through spirit.  I know I'm using inadequate words, but it's the experience that's important. The beauty of this is that we have to pass from one step to another. We can't just all of a sudden fly off into samadhi, but it is true that when we are holding our breath, that's where Pegasus can no longer carry Belerophon any further. That moment is beyond time of course; that condition is a timeless condition.

It's like the point in the swing of a pendulum where it is suspended. It is only the bottom of the pendulum that moves in time and space.   Of course we're not aware of the motion of the pendulum when we are centered upon its apex. The beauty of Tawhid  is to be able to extrapolate between our eternity and our transience; so this whole practice is like a pendulum. At the end of the swing of the pendulum, time stops. That is called the instant of time, and it is in the instant of time that something new can emerge in the universe. The moment is a parenthesis between the past and the future, but the instant cuts the process of becoming so that something new can emerge. These are the words of the dervishes. 

When we hold our breath after inhaling left, or after inhaling right, we are experiencing the instant of time, when the pendulum reaches the end of its swing. When we are holding our breath after breathing through both nostrils, we are experiencing eternity, immortality, rather than the instant of time. That's the meaning of Samad, eternity. When we are moving upwards, that is Qayyum.  There are two wazaif,  Qayyum and Baqa, resurrection. When we are resurrecting, we are extracting the quintessence of our being from its transient elements, like the perfume of the flowers. That which was transient has become eternal, is being eternalized - Qayyum. 
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That is the teaching of Jam. That means the quintessence of that which was ephemeral will be eternalized, just like perfume. That is what is happening to us.  We are rehearsing for the passage of death by resurrecting before we die.  That can only happen by transmuting our body. enhancing, from a purely physiological point of view, the esoteric chemistry of the body, the hormones, and the neurotransmitters, and the enzymes, maybe transmuting electrons into photons so that we continue to live as a being of light after the dispersal of the electrons of the body.

Photons don't have any mass. The process of transmutation takes place in our body, which is enhanced by our awareness of that process in our body. While the very subtle body, our celestial counterpart, acted as the template of our subtle body and of our physical body, now it is the result of the transmutation of our body and celestial body.

The template is transformed, and eventually our realization reaches beyond the representation of the template, to being the code, the Divine intention. There is no form anymore, so we are seeing the meaningfulness in life and the meaningfulness of our life. This doesn't make sense to the ordinary mind.  That is the upward movement. The descent is called Tawhid in Sufsim, seeing how the Divine thinking is working its way out in the phenonomal world.  That which does not seem meaningful now becomes meaningful, and is replaced by insight. If we have faith in our opinions, our faith depends upon something that is fallible, but we have faith in our realization. Consequently, we can see this working whereas our mind would produce proof of the contrary to our insight. That is the ultimate faith. 

What we call faith in our opinion, as belief, is not faith. We see that this practice, which started as a breathing practice, led us to realizations that maybe we could have attained without the practice, but the practice served as a wonderful support system to shift our understanding from our opinion to our realization. and then beyond realization into the sense of the Divine  presence, subsumed by the appearance of the physical reality.  Pir-o-Murshid said, "God is hidden in his creation." Beyond realization and the discovery of the sacred, is the presence of God, not the nature of God, not the realization of God, not the knowledge of God - the presence of God.  This whole practice was building a temple to invite the Divine presence. This is not just a view of the mind, to invite the Divine presence. What does it mean to invite the Divine presence? I can refer to one of the latest rules in physics, that an electron can only exist if we call it. If we create circumstances that favor its appearance, it exists; before that it is virtual. That is why Pir-o- Murshid says "Make God a reality," because otherwise God is a virtuality.  
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When I was in the Royal Navy during the Second World War, I spent four hours every night watching for German U-boats, and I was taught that if you scan the horizon you can never see them. Your eyesight has to be totally neutral.  Then a shadow appears and you draw your glance toward the shadow. If you scan the horizon you miss it. You are totally receptive, in a state of awaiting. Remember the words of Pir-o-Mushid, "Where will you find God if it is not in the spiritually God-conscious being?" Where will we find God? Where do we find the electron? We have to create the conditions in which the electron will appear, so that from a virtuality it has become a reality. The practice of the Dhikr is one of creating the circumstances that are favorable to the appearance of God. We are creating a temple for the Dhikr. With our body, with our subtle body, with our very subtle body, we are building a temple, a temple of light. Then we concentrate on the altar in the center of the temple of light, and we are creating circumstances which are favorable to the appearance of the Divine presence. The Divine presence is something felt rather than perceived. That is a sense of the sacred.

Ultimately what do we mean by spirituality? It is not realization. That is one level that we reach. It is not awakening. It has to do with inviting the Divine presence. That's what the churches are about, inviting the Divine presence, creating circumstances that are favorable to finding the Divine presence. There is a picture of Christ,  his heart is like a lamp, like a flame, and he is protecting this lamp with his hands against the storm. It's like carrying the Divine presence in our heart and having to protect it against the sacrilege of the gross world. It's a kind of feeling that we come across when we have been to a Catholic church. It's probably also true in the synagogues at the moment of the descent of the Shakinah - the Divine presence. In the Catholic church the people have Holy Communion. They take the Host, and they eat it, and they come back to their seats conscious of carrying the body of Christ, the Divine presence, in their being.  The wafer is a means to a certain attunement of consciousness. becoming aware of the Divine presence in the heart. Tawhid is not awakening, it is not illumination, it is not in the realm of realization. It is much more important, much deeper.


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A Visitor to the Earth

I think we've had enough methodology. Now we need to ask ourselves that impossible question:  "Who am I?"  We feel there's a lot of memory that is hidden, subsumed in our psyche, and we can retrieve that memory.  For example, we can remember when we were a child. Perhaps we can remember when we were a baby. I do. Perhaps we can even remember when we were in the womb of our mother. We can even remember prior to our conception, what Dr. Grof calls perinatal states.  If we can't remember that, then at least just think that we have at some point landed on planet Earth, and that means we belong to other levels of reality. When I say landed on planet Earth, I don't mean from another planet, but from other levels of reality that we are not clear about. There is just the sense that we are a visitor, a tourist, on planet Earth, and that it's not our real home.  

Earth is our 'home away from home' for a time.  The planet, through our parents and our ancestors, has provided us with an underpinning, a body, that is of the same nature as the planet, and which enables us to find out something about what things are like at the existential level. As we developed further, we got ourselves so inveigled in our involvements with situations and people that we forgot what this was all about. We forgot that we're a denizen of other planes, and we forgot we're a visitor. We got caught in a limited perspective, and our sense of identity has become funneled down and extremely constrained. We suffer joy and pain, or we incur joy and pain, and we are pummeled by life. This is the challenge of existentiation.

We want to do the reverse, and the way to do it is to consider that our body is an underpinning that has accrued to us in the course of our descent. Since it has accrued to us it has become part of us, so we can't separate ourselves from it, but it is less essentially us than our supercelestial being. We see how as we open our eyes the objects in around us force our eyes into focus. In the same way we can see how the appearance of situations in life have forced our consciousness into focus and affected our sense of identity. It suffices if we just know we have forgotten, or discounted, our true identity; that's all we have to do.  Then our need - our real, imperative need - to see clearly, to discover ourselves, to overcome that limitation, will be enough to awaken a dull memory.  

Now we see we can shift our focus upon our bodiness, so it's there, but it's like an anchor that we're not centered upon.  It's in the twilight of our awareness.  The same thing is true of the physical world.  It's very helpful to know it's not what we think it is.  It doesn't exercise the same pull upon our consciousness as if we think it is real; in fact it seems unreal.  
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Consequently, since it doesn't have the same impact upon our attention, it seems to be remote, rather like when we're going to sleep; we're not aware of the environment, so it's remote. It's there, but it's remote. For example when we're sleeping we could have thoughts, images that are projecting on the screen of our mind and at the same time be aware of the sound of cars on the street and the furniture in the room. 

At a further stage we're not aware of the physical environment, but we remember the way the physical world looked, and the awareness we had of our body. We remember that, but it seems like it does not impact our consciousness much because we keep on reminding ourselves that it is not what we thought it was.  The physical world is not what we thought it was.  The circumstances are not what we thought they were, and our body is not what we thought it was.  Now, when random thoughts, impinge upon our mind, we simply think to ourselves, "They are misleading because they refer to only one limited vantage point which is connected with my sense of identity." If we devalidate our thoughts they don't have the same impact upon our consciousness as before.  

Now, we may distinguish the peripheral thoughts from our deeper thoughts.  The peripheral thoughts are always concerned with our relationship to the environment; the deeper thoughts seem to have escaped that conditioning.  In fact, we begin to discover a kind of freedom from the way thoughts become compulsive and obsessive, and all we have to do is to devalidate them, to question their validity, and then they don't have an impact upon our mind. Now a very great breakthrough comes when we think that our self-image of our personality was faulty.  If we remember that in our dreams we assume personalities very different from the one with which we identify in our day consciousness, we can then imagine there could be different ways of looking at our person, and the commonplace way is rather inadequate. We are not what we thought we were.  

Therefore we do not continue to think we are what we thought we were,  because that was a fallacy. We can see how our personality became sclerosed into a self-image, and we really went along with that hoax, and took ourselves to be what we thought we were, and now we're free. We have unmasked that hoax. We are free from our assumption of being what we thought we were. Now there is no limit to what we are, because that includes all the potentialities and possibilities that are lying in wait. Our personality, on one hand, was inherited from our ancestors, so it's not really us; it's something that's accrued to us. What is more, it is an outgrowth from the stump of our being, which is the real being as compared with the outgrowth. That outgrowth is as transient and perishable as our body, at least what we think our body is.  

As a matter of fact, if we hang on to it, it will not change; therefore we have to let go of it, or dismiss it. "That's not me, it's a charade that I put on, I feel comfortable with it, and people identify me with it, but it's not really me. It's transient and ephemeral, whereas my real being  has a perreneity about it compared with the transiency of what I thought I was - my personality." 
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We find not only is it infinitely richer with potentialities, but it has a stability that gives us almost a sense of eternity. I say, "almost" because we don't know the stump, but we can see that it is evanescent; that it is continually emerging, and so we can almost take for granted that there is extraordinary wealth there, that our real being is coming through as we let go of our false conception of ourselves.   

This is reinforced by our acknowledging the fact that what we see in the mirror does affect our self-image. In fact we do unconsciously,  tend to identify with it.  Therefore a real breakthrough consists in questioning whether that form or formation really represents our being, because there are many factors. There's inheritance from our parents, our race, our age, perhaps sometimes even illness, the spillover from the environment, a lot of things.  There's the fact that flesh doesn't always lend itself that easily to the configuration of the reality of our being, our celestial countenance. 

We've discarded several things now. We've discarded our sense of bodiness.  We've discarded our personality, our thoughts. Having discarded them, we've devalidated them, or the representation we made of them. Now, we are freeing ourselves from our identification with the very form of our face.  At this point we need to make a quantum leap. We can't reach higher just by unmasking the hoax of all those things we've assumed, because now it is our sense of our individuality that stands in the way.  

The way of doing it is to bring into account the antipodal pole of our being, which we call God, instead of saying, "I want to know who I am  beyond the hoax of mirror, and self-image, and body and thoughts." We cannot know who we are, or even what the countenance of our real being is by trying to grasp it from our personal vantage point. This is where the notion of God comes in.  Remember, the breakthrough here is a word of Saint Francis, "That which I think I am observing" -  he says the observed - "is the observer."  What I think is the observed is the observer. This is a real quantum leap. Our real being is the way that God manifests Him/Herself to Him/Herself through us, and by the same token, discloses His/Her being to us by means of an imperfect image, like the voice of Caruso on a bad recording, which carries nevertheless, the true picture within it.  

This is what the Sufis call Jabbarut. I want us to have a sense of where we are going, but that breakthrough cannot happen either by our will or our realization.  It's only by our ecstasy; it's only by our attunement. There are different levels of emotion leading up to ecstasy.  It starts simply with an attitude of bewondering. "I think life is extraordinary. It never ceases to amaze me, with its good and its bad, but still somehow, if I could just realize that a photon in a beer can is as beautiful as the photons of the stars, and clearly discern the beauty of the soul of that person who is forlorn and cantankerous...."
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We are trying to see beauty where others can't see it. There are wazaif for this, ya Jemal, ya Latif for example, the subtle, the beauty that transpires behind what might be an ugly appearance.  Then there are Jelal and Majid: the Divine majesty, that we see in the majesty of the mountains, the majesty of the trees, the majesty of the lion or the elephant or the tiger or the king, the dervish.  Divine majesty.  Divine beauty.  It's like a symphony of emotions.  It starts by bewondering and then it becomes glorification, ya Azim, ya Alim,  ya Mutaali. Our intuition espies the nature of the sublime hidden behind the appearance of its opposite. That thought gives us a sense of the Divine ecstasy projecting His/Her being as us.  

God is discovering His/Her perfection in our imperfection. It's beyond logic of course. We have turned the tables and now we are getting into the Divine consciousness, starting with the Divine ecstasy. There's a story about this. Zeus was away from his throne, and his son Zachiarias sat on his throne. The Titans presented him with a mirror, and he discovered in the features of his face those of his father. He was so overwhelmed that the Titans took advantage of his ecstasy to drag him into the abyss and devour him. When Zeus came back he shattered the Titans with his thunderbolt, and mortals are born out of the ashes of the Titans who had eaten the Son of God. Therefore, we carry within us the inheritance of the Titans - our animal nature - and we also carry within us the Divine nature.  

We feel the ecstasy of discovering our Father in ourselves, or our Mother.  Our Divine Father.  Our Divine Mother. The ecstasy. It's not just the ecstasy of seeing how wonderful the reality is behind the universe, but in ourselves.  Being amazed by the beauty of ourselves, instead of denigrating ourselves.  That's what happens if we about-turn and see that it is God discovering Him/Herself as us; that's when we can accept the beauty of our being as we couldn't have seen ourselves. The consequence is that the Divine vision of Him/Herself in us is going to transform our being, releasing potentialities which could never have occurred if we had tried to mold our subtle body by ourselves. This is the missing factor.  

Let us assume we can mold our subtle body or very subtle body, and we can't do it through our will, but only through our attunement. The Divine ecstasy is our attunement, God in ecstasy discovering Him/Herself as us.  Imagine what that does; all the inadequacies fall away. That was the hoax of our limited vantage point. This is the extra-samsaric matrix which overrides the samsaric, and makes for mutation instead of recycling what we've always been, and frees us from conditioning.  This is where our detachment and indifference and independence is going to free us from the sclerosis of our personality, so we may be molded by the Divine action upon us.  We could also say, the Divine action of each fragment of Him/Herself, or the action of the universe upon each fragment of itself.  
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When we try to reminisce our perspective in our everyday condition, it seems such a far cry, it seems so erroneous, so mistaken, so totally inadequate. It's like being the men in the cave of Plato who are chained and can only see shadows on the wall. Then Plato says, "Well, suppose we take away their chains. They would be so blinded by the light that they wouldn't see anything anymore, and they would prefer going  back to where they were, looking at the shadows."  Then he said, "Imagine that amongst those people there is someone who thinks, 'Well, maybe I can't distinguish colors, or I can't see anything, like an owl in the daylight, but I'll get used to it.'"  So we get used to this transcendental overview.  We're able to discern now, meaningfulness that was not familiar to us, like a kind of super logic.  

We seem to be invited to being privy to the thinking of the universe, that is, the Divine thinking. Its source is not our thinking. We realize our thinking is of the same nature as the Divine thinking, but it was blurred by the personal mode of our thinking. We have a sense of awakening. Pir-o-Murshid describes it by saying, "Imagine that you're awake and walking about amongst people who sleep; and how can you communicate with them?  You realize that they can have no idea about your awareness because they're still sleeping. You used to be like that yourself.  But now you are awake."  That's what Christ said, "They know not what they do,"  like drunken people who don't realize they're drunk.  

Awakening is a shift from one perspective to another perspective.  The higher the perspective, the more inclusive it is.  It's not just one slice of the hologram, but a view that makes sense of the entire hologram.  Prior to this I've said it was one slice, a different slice, a different perspective, like looking at a cube on the blackboard and seeing how it shifts according to our glance.  No, it's more than that, it is like the brain, that can extrapolate between the vision of the two eyes.  It is seeing meaningfulness.  That's awakening, seeing meaningfulness where our mind cannot see it.   The only way to do it is to question our commonplace mind, or our commonplace perspective, or our commonplace opinion. That's what Buddha calls it, freedom from opinion.  Freedom from the notion of the personal 'I', is Buddhism. 
 
Now we have to do the reverse, and that is awakening in life instead of beyond life.  Beyond life we're grasping the programming, and the intention behind the programming, so it's like visiting the architect and seeing the blueprint of that building. Awakening in life is like visiting the building with the architect, and now we understand why the building is the way it is.  

Now if we can maintain our overview, and at the same time be aware of the way our problems seem to appear from our personal vantage point, to remember situations regardless of our opinion about them, then we see the issues that are enacted in our problems.  Instead of considering our problems, we're able to highlight what the issues are.  
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We find that the issues are always a quality.  For  example, that which is enacted in this situation is truth; which is enacted that the truth may become known, may explode.  That which is enacted in this situation is compassion; as long as there is no compassion, the situation is there.  That's what's being enacted.  

It's seeing the quality instead of ascribing the quality to a person. For example, somebody comes in the room, and people think "Oh isn't it wonderful to see this peaceful person," or a happy person comes in the room and people rejoice and say, "It's wonderful, this person is so happy."  If we adopt the point of view of awakening, we would say, "Isn't it wonderful to see peace manifesting as this person,"  or "Isn't it wonderful to see joy manifesting as this person." We begin to be acquainted with the qualities and we see those qualities being enacted in life.  That's where the language of the wazaif is going to throw light on our problems.  

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The Pathway to the Unattainable

La ilaha, we begin the Dhikr with the expansion of our consciousness, and consequently the expansion of our notion of ourselves beyond the idea of the individual to such an extent that we discover we are coextensive with the universe. For example, our body is made of the atoms of the stars and galaxies (one of the sayings of Jelaluddin Rumi). This kind of mental representation has a psychological effect on us by freeing us from the limitations of that particular dimension of ourselves that we might call our individuality, and which is based on the skin that is the barrier between what we think is ourselves and what is outside us.  Notice that La is really a crescent moon, a half circle.  

When we say ilaha, we are talking not just about the physical realm, so thinking about the stars and so on is not appropriate to this phase in the Dhikr where we are lifting our head up from the right shoulder to the zenith. At that moment we are thinking we are one with the stars, not just in our bodiness, but in all the levels, including the celestial levels and all the levels beyond our understanding.  

Pir-o-Murshid has a very specific meaning of ilaha, the Divinity of God -  the Divinity of God in us.  It's not the same thing as saying God is transcendence, or any kind of admixture with the existential state. 

When our head descends, when we say illa,we are turning within. There is a word of Shabistari, "Discover the whole universe within yourself." This is the implicate state.  Murshid says we get in touch with the essence of our being. We look at the outside from inside, and we can reach people from inside, in a state of communion, rather than judging people as other than ourselves. A kind of osmosis happens between other people and ourselves, and between ourselves and other people. We can find people in ourselves, so of course there's no more barrier.  The I - It relationship has become an I - Thou relationship, and ultimately becomes an I - I relationship. I am quoting Martin Buber.  

A very critical moment is the passage from illa to 'llah. It is found in the Qur'an Sharif that we are recurrently reborn. Consequently most of our thinking is reactionary.  We are reacting to what accrues to us from outside.  We are interpreting our problems. When we meditate, those are the thoughts that keep on striking our minds, and the clue to meditation is to discover another mode of thinking, which emerges from within, is creative, and which is so powerful that our elementary mode of thinking, where we are referring to thoughts that accrue from outside, seems to be dimmed by the power of the thoughts that arise from inside.  
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That's one of the great secrets of meditation.  At the stage of Mithal, which has been referred to as the mode of resurrection, we are actually projecting a new dispensation of our being, the rebirthing that is taking place, which is initiated in our attunement, and in our realization. We don't know how to say it. It's just  something about ourselves that we have never thought of, and all of a sudden we discover it.  Creativity is projecting our imagination, of course,  and imagination is translating our realization into a form.  That is the moment for our rebirthing to become adamant. We need to gel what is emerging into a countenance.  That's why we must, while repeating wazaif, try to grasp what our concentration on the wazifa does to the countenance of our being.  What is the countenance of our being if we are experiencing mastery?  What is the countenance of our being if we are experiencing compassion? truthfulness?   

This is a very concrete way of dealing with something that is rather nebulous.  It's very short lived. When we say La ilaha illa, it is just the a of illa.  With illa, we are turning within, but really turning within reaches a point where we pass the threshold from the existential level into fana, the void.  There is a transit there where we lose the sense of ourselves. It's like seeing a flying fish go under water.  We don't know what's happening now.  

When we say illa it's a whole process, because, as Shabistari says, we discover the whole universe in ourselves. Then, as we go deeper, we realize the universe is not static, it's dynamic.  It keeps on being recycled.  It keeps on being resorbed in the void and then recycled again.  So illa is a process, not just a state, a process.  This breaks down to the letters,i, and then two ll's, and then a. The ll's represent our getting into the void. We've lost any sense of what's happening. We're not supposed to introduce a state of holding our breath between exhaling and inhaling, but there is a kind of hiatus in La ilaha, illa, a kind of suspense. That's because if we were only recycling what we were, we would not be evolving, we would just be recycling, like a plant that becomes a seed, and then a plant, and so on.  

That's what Buddha means by the samsaric wheel. Buddha refers to the extrasamsaric matrix of our being, which is our Divine inheritance, which causes a mutation. It's another center, a power center that mutates our samsaric  being.  Otherwise we'd just keep on being what we are.  Creativity really only leads to a wholistic state if it includes all the levels of our being.  That's why the spontaneous effervescence of a new dispensation in us needs to incorporate the higher levels of our being, and it needs to have the support of the consciousness of those levels. That is why our consciousness shifts upwards through the planes, and particularly highlights the celestial level of our being when we say 'llah.  

The reason we do not say the first A of Allah is not simply because according to Arabic grammar we do not pronounce the second A if there are two A's. We don't say illa Allah.  No.  We say illa 'llah.  There is a sort of break which is very difficult to say, and the reason is because it is emerging from the void, therefore we can't say it.  Then comes the first l of Allah, and then we are measuring from the void.  It is very important to capture that particular privileged moment when we are being reborn.  Otherwise our rebirthing will be stillborn, which is happening all the time to most people.  
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So we capture it by projecting it into a form, but at that moment it's an encounter between all planes.  At the Mithal level it is an intermediary world. It includes both the higher and the lower,  both Nazut, the lower plane and Lahut, the celestial level, which is what Buddha means by the extrasamsaric matrix of our being.  

At that moment there's a kind of intuition that enables us to foresee the action of our celestial being in the formation of our new personality. When we say 'llah, our head turns upwards and that corresponds with the sense we have of lifting our consciousness through the different planes. 

All the practices we do, the preparation, the training, are trying to gain for us some sense of what we mean by those higher planes.  Otherwise we are just using words. I become more and more wary of words because they become clichs and are empty of meaning. They can only act as labels if, when we mention a word, we are thinking of the experience that corresponds to that word.  

It is discovering, really discovering, the angel in us, which is there in our deep unconscious, hidden perhaps under a bushel.  It's the child in us, or even the baby in us, that is defenseless, innocent, and immaculate, and which is there - just like the voice of Caruso - within the bad admixture that was due to the spill-over from the environment.  

This is where our self-image meets with a tremendous paradox, because it's very difficult to believe in ourselves when we are very aware of our guilt, and our resentment, and all our inadequacies, and all those kinds of psychological trips that are exactly what psychotherapists are helping their patients with.  It's very difficult at the same time to believe in the divinity of our being, which is our only salvation. That is why Pir-o-Murshid speaks of the aristocracy of the soul and the democracy of the ego being able to reconcile the most irreconcilable of any thoughts that we could ever have.  

I think the best illustration of this situation is in the voice of Caruso, recovered nowadays in its pristine glory from within its bad recordings. It's there. We don't have to imagine the angel there. That's something we inherited from the legends of the past. It's really discovering the child in ourselves that is innocent, and pure, and immaculate, that can never be tarnished, whatever we do. As Pir-o-Murshid says, it's like a mirror that can never be tarnished by the impression upon it.  All we do is turn the mirror and the impressions have gone.  This cuts right into all the psychological problems of people, self esteem, and also our need to discover the sacred, because the child is sacred.  
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Once we've grasped that, we know we are associated with the ideal,"I am the temple of God, and my heart is the altar in the temple of God." This is where we touch upon the sacredness in our being.  Pir-o-Murshid says, "There is a time that you reach a stage in your life where you are in the quest for the unattainable." It's a wonderful thought because if it could be obtained we could put it in our pocket and say, "Now I'm a realized being, or an illuminated being." We could never say that, but the possibility kind of lures us beyond ourselves.  

An associated idea is that by glorifying, we project upon God excellent qualities in ourselves, that are made into superlatives. Consequently we are awakening these qualities in ourselves that would be dormant if we were not glorifying.  Even though the qualities that we project upon God are not what God is, the very act of glorification does awaken these qualities in ourselves.  

That's why in Islam it is said that the God created in our prayers is not God, it's the God created in our prayers, but that God becomes us because we are awakening the God within.  

Pir-o-Murshid says there are several stages. One is the concept of God. The next is the experience of God, and the third is awakening the God within. "Make God a reality and God will make you the truth." In this sense, Dhikr is a very deep experience;  but if we just  repeat the words, La ilaha illa 'llah, it becomes the vain repetition that Christ deprecated. There is no point in doing it. It will get us into a trance state, and hysteria, and all the kinds of things that are found amongst some of the Sufis in the East. That's not what the Dhikr is about.  

The Dhikr really embodies the Islamic prayers without the words, without the Suras of the Qur'an.  What Pir-o-Murshid says about the ego is right on.  He says  the ego is the way we identify with a fraction of ourselves, which we parade as being us, and which we utilize as a defense system against attacks of people.  We don't know how to defend ourselves except by our ego, so we are really calling upon only one aspect of ourselves, and not utilizing the enormous pool of resourcefulness in our being.

So illa is not just turning within; it also fana.There are two aspects of fana. The first, as Ib'n Arabi says, is that we are not annihilating ourselves. (We couldn't annihilate ourselves, anyway.) All we are doing is annihilating the false idea we have of ourselves, our self-image. Having done that, then all of the latent qualities start emerging in a new birthing by dint of our turning upward in an act of glorification.  

The deeper aspect of fana I can only illustrate by a very tangible example. There is an object in nature which looks like a flower, but is really a lot of insects that have all conglomerated into a configuration that mimics a flower. If we blow upon it all of a sudden, the insects fly off in all directions, and then if we are very quiet and keep a little away,  they come and settle back into the configuration of a flower again.  
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The question in my mind is, "Is it exactly the same insects that return to exactly the same position as before, or is it the overall form which is determined and the position of the individual insects is not important?" Another question is, whether the flower, or what looks like a flower, is exactly the same now as it was before we blew on it or whether it looks different, whether its configuration is different. I suppose it is different, and therefore, as in alchemy,  before the coagule, first of all solve. That means we must dissolve before we can restructure ourselves again. Maybe we have to lend ourselves to this disintegrating power in the universe in order to enlist the way the universe self-organizes itself that is beyond our will and beyond our understanding.  

That is a deeper experience of the Dhikr, fana. Fana is always accompanied by Baqa.  That means dissolution is always accompanied by a resurrection.  That is why we must be very careful of the concept of therapy.  A person would be healed because s/he gets back to the way of good health, turning the tables on the illness so it sparks a new birth in our being, a new personality.  

Now we come across a thought that is very important, that we are an admixture of the evolved animal and the angel. The samsaric recycling element in our being is exactly what Buddha deprecates: the wheel, reincarnation, making the same mistakes, and continuing to be what we have always been. Sometimes degenerating people were nicer when they were kids or young people.  When they get older they become surly and lose their enthusiasm for life.  This happens unless we can enlist that other extrasamsaric matrix of our being, the discovery of the angel in us that uplifts us, and transfigures us, and transforms us.  Pir-o-Murshid says to discover this we have to find ourselves in a situation which enlists what is called dj vu. For example, the light coming through the eyes of a baby seems to remind us of something that we have forgotten, another level of reality that is familiar.  We think, "Ah, yes, I'd forgotten this, yes, of course, the memory of the celestial spheres." This experience will awaken that level of identity which, in Sufism, corresponds to Malakut, the level of the angel.  

It's not just projecting unrealistic thoughts of what we think of as an angelic world up there; it is discovering the angel in ourselves, which is hidden under many veils, and many excuses, and false modesty. The Sufis say we are refusing the divine gift by deprecating ourselves, devalidating ourselves.  In fact it's an inverted form of pride.  The Sufis present a map. As Korzybsky said, the map is not the territory,  but it is good to know that this new creativity in us is perfected, or completed, by our rediscovering the celestial being in ourselves. This does require us to free ourselves from the limitation of earthly conditions.  I'm not talking about circumstances, but freedom from our opinion, our way of thinking, and our way of emoting, that is limited by earthly conditions.  
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What we do is loosen our dependence upon, or our attachment to, worldly circumstances.  That is what is meant when Christ says, "They are in the world but not of the world."  It doesn't mean not in the world, like the sanyassins in India.  That's not the Sufi idea.  No.  It's just something very internal that happens, that we are not in a state of dependence. We know what addiction is. We are addicted to all kinds of things, and one of them is earthly conditions, the support system that takes over. We are just caught up in the support system and we don't have time or energy to reach beyond.  

We also discover the Divinity, the deathlessness of our being, but first it is the perreneity of our being. An example of perreneity would be that it is always the same river, but not the same water, that flows under the bridge. Perreneity is a continuity in change. It is not deathlessness, but it is a step toward understanding limitation in the transient and empirical condition of our being. If we do that then we shift our identity away from identifying with our body. 

I want to make it quite clear that there is a difference between our body and our bodiness. Our body after death undergoes rather dramatic changes.  It is not true that our bodiness dies, because the electrons of our body continue to live forever, and so do the photons, so the idea about death is one of the most nonsensical ideas that we have. What is important here is not just to realize, but to actually work on the transmutation of our bodiness. I'm not speaking in metaphors, because if we identify ourselves with what is called the subtle body, then we realize it's not only a template, the matrix or the code that configures the cells of our body. It's a deeper reality.

As our body evolves, and as it's in the process of what is called resurrection, the matrix itself is transmuted.  That's what is called resurrection. In our meditation, we schlep our body upwards in our realization, instead of leaving it behind, which is a very dangerous situation. People pass out, or get into a state of trance because they've neglected their bodies. 

Our body is part of us, so the only way to do it is to really experience what it means to transmute the body, the activities of the body that represent what I call esoteric biochemistry. The enzymes that transmute, that see to the replication of DNA and RNA, neurotransmittors, and the hormones of the body represent a higher level of our bodiness than, for example, the structure of the nails of our fingers, our hair and so on. We don't have to discard our body but we do need to realize that it is the underpinning of our resurrection.  It is the instrument of our resurrection. Like, extracting perfume from flowers, we have to let go of our attachment to those aspects of our body that need to fall apart, but still cleave to the quintessence of our bodiness. That is what we experience in a transfigured state. When we just walk in nature we find ourselves in a transfigured world. That is an experience of our subtle body.  
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These are clues to how we lift our consciousness.  That word, lift, is very misleading.  It's not like we're shifting our consciousness from one level to another.  We have to incorporate all those levels and be aware of them as we move upwards.  It is true that we need to downplay being limited by the perspective of our bodiness, or our commonplace psyche - "How do I feel?"  and "What do I think?" and so on.  We have to transcend them.

For every level of identity there is a mode of thinking.  If we identify with our body that is a mode of thinking which is called Khayal. If we identify with our subtle body then there is a mode of thinking called Mithal, that is creative instead of  being a reaction to the environment, and if we identify with our celestial body,  Malakut, then there is a mode of thinking called Jabbarut, where our thinking is absolutely free from being based upon experience.  It is a thinking that is revealed to us instead of a thinking that we acquire. It's revealed to us because we are born with an inherent knowledge.  

We are born with the thinking of the whole universe, but as our consciousness becomes limited to what we think we are as an individual, we lose the thinking of the universe and base our knowledge upon our experience, or upon our way of interpreting experience. When we rediscover that thinking, we realize how inadequate our personal thinking is. That's Jabbarut.  It's a kind of break-through of realization in the Dhikr which the two ll's of 'llah represent. The last ah of 'llah represents Lahut, which is like the archetypes behind the universe, all the sifat, all that we are referring to in our practice of the wazaif.  

It's like being invited to the court of the king. The strategy that is the secret of the king cannot be conveyed to everybody. That's Lahut.  Then beyond that, there is an h at the end of Allah and we must say that h. We must not say Allah Hu.  No.  It's Allahhu. H is a continuity of the a, Allahhu.  There's no break.  It is very difficult not to make a break because that h represents Hahut, which is the level of unity beyond diversity. That means beyond the diversity of sifat, the different qualities.  Ib'n Arabi says, "If the names disappeared the named would appear." Stress upon the wazaif stands in the way of our experiencing the reality of God.  That's why the Dhikr represents a far more advanced stage than representing and repeating the wazaif.  

I think of Pir-o-Murshid; his last words before he passed away were, "When the unreality of life disappears, then the reality of life strikes me." It's like all of a sudden awakening from that vision in which, as the Sufis say, God is revealing himself by devices.  What we are experiencing in the physical world, and also qualities in our personality, are only ayat. They are only signs in which the reality that could never be limited to the way that it is disclosed, is disclosing itself.  At the Hahut level God does not need to use devices anymore. This is the ultimate reality.  
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The beauty of the Dhikr is that it is followed by Hu. Therefore, the objective is not awakening beyond, but awakening in life. There are many ways in which Murshid says this. I often say, "Well, imagine that you have visited the architect, and seen the blueprints, and then afterwards you go and visit the monument accompanied by the architect. Then you understand what is on his mind." That is awakening in life rather than awakening beyond life. Murshid says more specifically, "Where are you to find God if it's not in man?" Well, "Where are you to find God if it's not in the God-realized man?"  

That word 'find' is very important. The wazifa Mawjud, which we often describe as meaning the existential state, to make God a reality, has an etymological link with the sifat Wajid, which means to find.  Murshid says, "You find God."  It's very interesting; there is a parallel with some of the latest views of  physics. An electron only exists if we create circumstances which enable us to find it.  In the same way we can consider that God is a virtuality and only becomes a reality if we create circumstances in ourselves in which God becomes a reality. 

That's why Murshid says, "Make God a reality."

The whole purpose of the Dhikr is not to know God, it's to make God a reality.  It's not samadhi.  Samadhi is knowing beyond knowing, but this is really making it happen in our being. We cannot exaggerate the sense, the meaning, of Hu. 

I've been describing the Dhikr, starting with something down to earth, our bodies being part of the stars, and then we got to more advanced ways of thinking.  

There are three different types of Dhikr. The first is where we are going into these four different dimensions and discovering their meaning to ourselves. The second one is not knowledge any more. Its meaning is revealed to us in a way which we could never have attained by trying to capture it with our mind.  

The third Dhikr is the one I want to emphasize now, and that is the Dhikr that the guide does for his/her Mureeds.  When the guide says La ilaha, and his/her consciousness expands, it is not just Basit, which is existential consciousness, but Wasi, which means that he/she is encompassing his/her mureeds,  holding them in his/her consciousness.  In fact, s/he is gathering them in his/her consciousness, Jami.  

There is an osmosis between beings so we can find another person in ourselves and s/he can find us in him/herself.  We don't have to look for that person out there.  That person is here in ourselves, and the Dhikr is what we feel.  

One thing we can do is to know that our suffering is our participation in the cosmic drama. Instead of thinking, "Why is this happening to me? God is so unfair to me!" it makes it easier if we think, "Well, we are all in this together and some are carrying a little more weight of the cross than others, but it's the cosmic drama." There is no doubt that in fana there is pain.  There is a pain of separation, of abandonment, "Why hast thou abandoned me!" In our minds we can't understand what is happening.  
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As we say 'llah, we are exalting in our worship, and the guide carries his/her mureeds with him/her in his/her exaltation because when we are sharing bread at the same table something happens that does not happen if we are eating alone.  That's the reason for joint prayers together.  What the guide can do in his/her counselling is very little in comparison with what can be done in the higher spheres. People asked Pir-o-Murshid something about this and he said, "Most of my work is done on the higher spheres."  

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Consciousness Deprived of an Object


In the cool of the early morning we can find peace and quietness, which is conducive to discovering our deeper selves. We need to downplay our relationship with the outer world, and as a consequence the more subtle reality that we don't see through our gross senses begins to manifest.

I'm trying to communicate the attunement I have been in during my retreats in India, although with a difference. It might be helpful to just feel that kind of attunement. We surround ourselves with a zone of silence, so we're impervious to any kind of disturbance, while we enjoy the wonderful sense of communion with nature until such time that we turn within and we're no longer conscious of the environment at all. I can think of those wonderful moments, sitting at the source of the Ganges in the early morning, with the anyassins coming and sitting around me in a very peaceful state, with a wonderful sense of peace, beyond any kind of description whatsoever.  

This state gives us a shield against being continually the victim of the challenge of the environment in our civilization. Sitting in that state I would not have heard about the crash of the TWA plane, or the bomb in Atlanta, or the terrible murder that took place, or all those horrible things that are happening. We are sitting in the splendid isolation, finding beatific peace, but not really sharing in the suffering of the world.  That was the reason Buddha did not go along with the way of the Yogis,  because he felt that they were not dealing with suffering.  

What we are about is very, very subtle.  We want to place a buffer between ourselves and the environment, or to consider those zones of silence as a buffer.  All  it means is we do not react to the disturbance of the environment.  We do not cut it out altogether. I think the best illustration of this is to be found in Beethoven, the Fourth Piano Concerto, where he describes the world as the orchestra that comes with a terrible challenge. Instead of reacting, he illustrates himself by the piano. He is not out of touch with the world, but he does not react. If we react, we're not using all the faculties in our being, the pool of resources in our being.  It's like a reflex action, automatic.  Beethoven is taking into account that cry of agony. Maybe it wasn't just a challenge. Maybe it was a cry of agony of the world. Out of this comes one of the most wonderful melodies Beethoven ever composed.  We might say if he had reacted, this melody would never have arisen, but if it had not been for this challenge, the melody would not have arisen either.  
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Somehow we process that cry of agony in the depth of our being instead of simply reacting at the periphery of our being. There is no causal relationship, we can't say it's a causal relationship, but it acts as a trigger, and arouses in us something that ultimately is an answer. I suggest that we don't isolate ourselves totally.  We'll find a very peaceful state in ourselves which is listening to all the rather disturbing things that are happening around Earth. We know that we cannot help out by simply reacting.

First we surround ourselves with a zone of silence and place a sentinel at the doors of perception, so we are not exposed to the onrush of influences coming from the outer world. Then we place sentinels in our mind so we are able to guard ourselves from thoughts that are disturbing. We need to get to a deeper place of thinking, where thought emerges from within instead of being a reaction to outside. Thoughts surfacing within may manifest  in the peripheral areas of our psyche, and  get infused into the universe, but we keep on touching upon the life source of creative thinking, and that thinking is beyond words and without words.

The same applies to light and sound. Our attention and our consciousness is ordinarily turned outward in order to receive light, sound and many other sensations. As long as we are alert to those impressions coming from outside we will not be sensitive to the light emerging from within or the sound of the universe emerging within.  
 
Now let us just set up this zone of silence around us. Let us realize that we are continually ingesting the environment.  That is, we just think of impressions while we're sitting meditating. Impressions from our life, from the environment, the news, all kind of things that are sometimes very disturbing, tend to pass through the threshold between outside and inside. They affect our psyche. The outer world, inside us, has been transformed into the elements of our psyche. It's just like eating food. We know that food, as we ingest it, becomes part of our system. It's been processed. 

Now, in the case of food, we can reject food that we can't digest.  That's why we peel a vegetable, and so on. The same is true with the psyche. We can reject impressions that are disturbing by the power of our inner peace,  What I mean by rejecting them is refusing to allow them to cause a disturbance in our psyche while we're meditating. It's not very constructive to react.  What we want to do, if we can, is downplay all those thoughts that are connected with the environment, then thoughts will emerge from within that are uncalled for, that cannot be accounted for, that are not caused by the challenge of the environment.  

As we inhale, we think that the impressions of the environment are filtered through a kind of a buffer.  What is more, as with food, we don't only ingest it, but we transform it, we digest it.  We can do exactly what we are doing when we extract perfume from the flowers. If our mind is thinking of a situation in our life, we can extract in our thinking the essence of that situation, rather than the contingent aspects of it.  
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I'll give you an example. There was an accident.  At the time we remembered the name of the street, the color of the car, a lot of details.  After many years, we don't remember the details. All we remember is the expression of anguish on the face of the person who was hurt, or the expression of guilt on the face of the person who was responsible for the accident. That is the quintessence of the situation.  As we turn within, in order to prevent our psyche from being disturbed by the outer expression of the problem, we need to transmute, and just retain the gist in our psyche.  After inhaling, we hold our breath, and see if we can grasp the core of our being, which is like a mirror that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it. Of course it is open to the impressions, but we simply turn the mirror, and the impressions have gone.  Somehow the impressions from the outer world are absorbed by our psyche, transformed, and eventually resorbed in the void. That is the way the ascetic finds peace in the midst of the disturbances of the world.  

In the world, whether we know it or not, we are playing a role and we are wearing a mask. That mask is what we see when we look in a mirror.  In the course of a retreat we discover our real being behind the role we're playing in life. We discover our celestial countenance behind our physical face. I suggest we try and grasp the countenance of our real being. Think that we're wearing a mask, and we discard the mask, and ask ourselves,"Who am I?" Maybe we can actually grasp the features of the countenance of our real face behind the mask. If we come across it, we know, "This is me."Something clicks and we know, "This is me." 

We notice that at the periphery of our psyche there is a spillover between the world and ourselves, between the environment and ourselves.  That's the area of our being that's adapting itself to the environment.  If we turn deeper in ourselves, then we discover who we really are.  I suggest we hold our breath between inhaling and exhaling, so we're absorbing the environment as we inhale,  and then as we hold our breath, there are no more thoughts, and no more emotions, and no more consciousness, suspense. What's happening is not conscious any more.  That's what we interpret as being the void. Now as we exhale, we try to reach out to the outer world from inside. I'll give you an example. We're swimming on the surface of the water of a lake and we see water lilies. Now we're swimming under the lake and we see that there's a  network of the roots that surface in the form of the flowers. That would be an illustration of what we're doing now.  We're reaching the outer world from inside. 

To enhance this turning, we do the practice of Shaghal, also called yoni mudra. Pir -o-Murshid says by placing an obstacle to consciousness which is turned outside, consciousness will redirect its awareness deep inside, so we may discover a whole world emerging from within. We are acting as a transmitter of energy from the different planes into the physical world. The inner reality beyond all forms in the depths of our being manifests to our cognizance through the means of what we experience as light, or sound, or as smell, or taste, or touch.
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For Pir-o-Murshid, breath is the bridge between the outer world and the inner. The secret is, as we are breathing, we continue to think we are drawing energy from outside. Breathing is not just absorbing oxygen, but also drawing energy from the environment, so we imagine we are converging energy, as we often do, but now think that we are breathing from within, drawing energy from  inside, from the source of all energy, and that this energy is surfacing and emerging, and eventually diffusing into the universe, so it's a new dispensation of energy.  In so doing we are awakening latent faculties in our subtle bodies. We are becoming aware of the subtle counterparts of our being, that we call subtle bodies in the celestial spheres, and consequently they become a whole person. We feel spirit discovering itself at the existential level. 

So in Shaghal we place our index fingers on our eyelids. We turn our eyeballs upwards. We place the fourth and fifth fingers on our lips,  and the middle fingers on our nostrils. We press the middle finger of our left hand and breathe in through the right nostril.  We hold our breath, and then exhale through the right nostril. Now we place our thumbs in our ears, and simply do three breaths with our hands in position.  Afterwards we take our hands away, and maintain our concentration.  Our consciousness is used to being turned towards outside.  If we place an obstacle in the way of our consciousness, then it is going to about turn.  Then we'll be able to discover what we were looking for outside, but we will discover it inside.  

With our eyes open, we see the light emitted by the objects around us. Now as we close our eyes, after doing this practice, we may have a feel we are seeing light.  In fact we're not seeing radiant light, but what Pir-o-Murshid calls the all-pervading light.  It's like radio waves. Everything is everywhere. The light forms wave interference patterns instead of being radiant.

We are placing a bind on the eyes and ears. The lips are closed which affects our thinking so we do not think in a way that is limited by language or concepts. We are drawing energy from within by our breath, and the effect of this is cumulative.  

Let us do three breaths.  Now we concentrate on sound instead of light.  When we're turned outside, we can hear sound.  When our consciousness about turns and is turned within, then maybe we're not hearing sound, but we are aware of a kind of internal vibration.  

Now let us do it again.  This time as we hold our breath we concentrate on the solar plexus. We think of it as a gate that opens up into the void where everything is resorbed, then emerges again in a whole new way as we exhale.
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Now we do it once more.  This time we turn our eyeballs upwards and concentrate on the pituitary gland as we hold our breath so that we're not just turning within but we are turning upwards at the same time.  Instead of looking at the outer world from the inside, we have the impression as though we had a kind of bird's eye view over the world.  We see the difference between considering the world from within and considering it from above.  

Let us pinpoint the wazaif that correspond with these four different dimensions.  The first is ya Zahir, ya Batin. Zahir  is reaching out, manifesting to view. Batin  is turning within, the veiled one, the secret of our soul that we cannot express in words. Then somehow it becomes expressed without words.  Zahir -  manifesting the non-manifest. Zahir is the epiphany, that is the manifestation of light appearing at the surface. Batin is that which is not yet manifest, which is hidden, the secret of our soul, which is trying to manifest by means of devices. The physical universe is made of devices through which the Divine reveals His/Her intention, that which appears. Batin  is that which is hidden behind that which appears.  Think of our life, our life situation. We're aware of that which appears.  That's how our problems look to us.  That's the way they appear.  We are not aware of what is hidden behind what appears.  What are the deep spring-heads behind the situations.  If we do not try to grasp things as they appear, then the secret is revealed.  We cannot reach it with our efforts, but it is revealed to us from the inside as a kind of intuition.

Now instead of saying the words, we think them. Think Zahir as we exhale and Batin as we inhale, very slowly.  What we explain or what we understand with our mind and therefore explain in our words, that's Zahir.  Batin is what we imply behind what we explain, which words could never express.  

For the other two dimensions, reaching upwards is ya Ali, a sense of existing on several levels, several spheres, the angelic spheres, being uplifted through our act of glorification.  Then ya Mawjud gives us a sense of having descended through the spheres and landed on Earth in order to experience planetary conditions.  We're an exile from our real realm,  beyond Earth's sphere, which we reach through a sense of incorporating through our bodiness, through the existential state, the incorporation of pure spirit. As we inhale that is called in alchemy, the materialization of spirit, and as we exhale, the spiritualization of matter.  Mawjud.  ya Ali - ya Mawjud.  Mawjud  is actuation, existentiation, incarnation. See how our consciousness can shift from one attunement to another. We're conscious of our body, Mawjud, When we say ya Ali, we downplay our body consciousness, but we are transmuting our bodiness. We're not separating, we're not building a cleft between spirit and matter.  That's why it's called the spiritualization of matter.  We can think of the esoteric chemistry of our body,  we can think of our subtle body as the template of our physical body, and also the resurrection of our physical body, the body of resurrection.  It's not different than our body, but it's much more subtle. 
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These are the things we discover as we turn within.  It is too taxing to concentrate on all these things at the same time so we start by simply being aware of the light. This is not the light of our aura which converges with the light of the stars, but the light that emerges from within, which we converge as we exhale into a radiant light. In its initial mode it is all pervading  it is not radiant. We converge it as it emerges and then it radiates from our heart as our aura. Our aura is made up of the light that we converge from the stars, and also the light that emerges from within.

So discard any impression of light that can be seen. That's an optical illusion due to our having exercised pressure on our cornea transferring stimuli to the retina. We could think that this is the inner light, so let us not delude our selves. It is not light to see, at least not at first, until we can distinguish between the two. The only way to put it is light that we feel.  It does become visible to some extent as we exhale; it becomes radiant light, the light of our aura. As we exhale we think of ourselves as Alladin's lamp, which cast its light upon all things. What I do very often is imagine the current emerging, surfacing from within and lighting up a bulb in the heart. 

Pir-o- Murshid says this is the first step, do not think this is illumination, illlumination lies further ahead, beyond the beyond.

What we experience after taking our hands away is almost more important than when our hands are in position. The practice is like a ladder. In order to trigger off an experience that has a lasting effect, we continue the concentration after taking our fingers away.  In fact the whole purpose of Shaghal is to be able to do it without using our fingers upon the senses at any time.

To do this last practice more perfectly, as we inhale through the solar plexus, the breath acts as a Pegasus, a flying steed - Baroq in Islam, Garuda in Hindusim - that carries our consciousness upward. We simply think that at the point corresponding to our pituitary gland, Pegasus cannot fly any higher and Belerophon, our consciousness, needs to avail itself of the momentum imprinted upon it by breath, and now proceeds on its own by simply shifting the level of consciousness from being consciousness to being pure intelligence.

Consciousness is passive or receptive, but if you deprive consciousness of its object (any perception or conception) then it returns to its ground, which is pure intelligence, an inherent cognizance we have that is confirmed by experience, but  does not result from experience. As we exhale, we illuminate our aura with the light of intelligence, the light upon the light.  This is the secret of secrets, the key to illumination.  





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Tools of Meditation


by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan



Inspired by the Teaching of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

First Edition, August 1996 
Second Printing, February 1997
Third Printing, July 1997 



The material in this volume was drawn from transcripts of the seminar given by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in Madison, Wisconsin in March, 1996.

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Jyoti Jessica McLachlan and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner.





(Page 1)


The Premises of Meditation


If you want meditation to be effective for you and to really leave a mark on your being, you need to make some kind of commitment. I will be sharing that process with you and conveying my experiences, so that you might reflect them and mirror them. This is an interactive process. 

Let's start with a few essential preliminaries. For one thing, we need to meditate every day, at a regular hour, as a preparation for the day. It's worthwhile getting up half an hour in advance; it will make all the difference in your day. Make a schedule for yourself. It could vary, but there needs to be some continuity in it. I make my schedule in four parts according to the moon: new moon and full moon and so on. You can even decrease the meditation in the last half and give yourself a sabbatical during the last quarter, then start up again. 

If possible, do a visualization of light practice every day. The beauty of the practices of light is that you start being aware of that area of radiance around your body, and actually it does intersperse the cells of your body. You have a different sense of identity which intersperses all things, rather than having just a sense of boundary. It's also good to start your period of meditation with a breathing practice, because it's very effective as a preparation for meditation. Many different practices build up as a whole, so I don't think it's a good thing just to pick one. It's consequential. Start with one, then the next, and so on in a regular manner. Build it up over a period of a month, for example, and then start again.

 Questioning One's Self-Image 

There are very important psychological implications in our practices because our real struggle in life is with our self-esteem and our self-image, which is not what we are. Meditation is a way of learning who one is, or who we are, and this helps to avoid denigrating one'self. A kind of self-defeatism comes when one does not know who one is. It's counterproductive; one is defeating one's own purpose. When one meditates, there's no point in trying not to think about one's problems because they're stronger than you. Those thoughts will force their way into your mind. 

In physics, particles collide, whereas waves compose with each other, forming a wave interference pattern. If you think of yourself as a field rather than a solid block, the boundary is your skin; you have this new experience of osmosis, communion between yourself and other people. It makes for not only an (Page 2) expansion one's notion of one's self, but also a freeing from the limitation of one's self-image. 

That self-image is not what one is, but one is carrying it the whole time, working on false premises all the time. This is absolutely basic. If you don't do that, then you will naturally slip into the commonplace kind of consciousness that most people are in, with all the defects and foibles. There are, of course, the rather harmful impressions that you think you have acquired from your interface with the social environment. If they were not in you, they wouldn't spill over on you. One doesn't like to own that one has these in one, and I think it's very urgent that we should be able to deal with that.

Imagine now that you are sitting in meditation and think, "Well, what should I do? If I just sit there evil thoughts could keep on accumulating in my mind; I won't get anywhere." I have a few suggestions. First, think that you are a denizen from outer space who has landed on the planet Earth. It's rather a simplistic way of thinking but actually, ultimately it is really true. I don't mean we are from outer space but that our body has accrued to us in the course of time. That will make you at least open to sensing levels of your being that cannot be limited to your body or your mind. It's just an idea that I have found very helpful, to think that one is a tourist on the planet earth, but more than a tourist because hopefully one is leaving a mark on the planet. It gives you a jolt in your self-image as we ask ourselves, "Who am I?"  Question who you are, because that's the worst thing is if one is convinced that one is what one thinks one is. That's what is happening all the time.

The second thing is, you have been gifted by the whole cosmos with this fantastic body. It's such an extraordinary privilege, the idea of what it takes to make a body,  and think that people commit suicide. The cosmos has confectioned this brain which is able to help enrich consciousness that is buried, and in which this consciousness awakens. It is actually the consciousness of the universe that enables one to know the universe. That is really extraordinary. This consciousness doesn't happen to rocks; it does happen to animals to some extent, but what a privilege it is! Think of meditation as a means of being very clear of who you are and what you are doing. Think to yourself, "Well, I've got this fantastic equipment now, but what am I doing? I have to really get to work, otherwise I'll be on the dole."

 It's true that one gets into a kind of machinery and if one does not move forward, one will be right out there, like the homeless. One really has to get one's trip together. On the other hand, if that is the purpose of life, then it's really not worth its while. In the meantime one has a terrible sense of frustration: "I'm not getting anywhere in my life. What's it all about? I'm no good anyway, you know?" One is always trying to vie and compete with the Jones'. The bright guys get the better places, and all that kind of stuff that we're into. One feels that if I do that, then somehow I develop in me animosity for people, lack of love. It's (Page 3) very bad for one's being, so we have to see very clearly what life is doing to us. All that is just the premise of meditation.

 Examining One's Motives 

According to the Sufis, the first step, what we call Makum, is Muhasibi, which means self-examination, or examination of conscience. It's not working with consciousness, but working with conscience. In the course of one's involvement in life one loses sight of one's values. When we were younger and caught up in our naive youthfulness we entertained high ideals of splendor, that life is going to be wonderful. Perhaps it's not true of everyone, but I was brought up in the thought that God is beautiful, and you aspire towards something noble and high in your life. Somehow those initial drives get washed out of one. It starts very early, and one begins to doubt those values. When you are examining yourself and your motivations, you need to match your motivations with your objectives. Hopefully your objectives are high, based upon your scale of values. My objective is living up to my ideal, and so it's a definite objective.

What am I doing to match my motivation, my objectives, with the reality of the nitty gritty of life? You find there's a difference between the two, and that is already rather devastating, because one finds one hasn't been able to live up to one's objectives. One puts it down to circumstances: "In these circumstances there is no way I can fulfill what I would have liked to do because I'm limited in my circumstances." I would say the issue is really the degree to which one adapts one's self to the environment, or one adapts the environment to one's sense of purpose. The strong beings in life have adapted the environment to their own sense of purpose instead of adapting themselves altogether to the environment. One leaves an impact on the environment.

Of course there's a balance between the two. Ultimately it amounts to the interface and interaction between one's qualities and idiosyncrasies, one's personality, and the circumstances. That's the interface. A practice you could do is recollect your past, if possible in a chronological order. The first thing you notice is the way the circumstances affected your nature. For example, after an accident you became more cautious; when somebody did you harm you adopted anger or even hatred. One has reacted to the environment. That you can see, and it's good to see each step very precisely, like I remember this happened and from that moment on I was different.

What is more difficult is to see the effect of one's self on the environment,. but you can; there is a way of doing that. Recall how you were in retrospect ten years ago. Think to yourself, "If I had been then what I am now, things would not have happened the way they did." That will convince you that indeed your being has an impact on the environment. 
 (Page 4) 
 Facing One's Shadow 

There's something more to it, and that's something Jung saw, because sometimes one doesn't see how one's being affects the environment. There are situations where it becomes rather evident, but one doesn't like to see it. For example, if you find that people turn away from you, it's a bad sign. You've got feedback right there. Jung saw that very precisely, very deeply. There is a synchronistic link between your being and your circumstances. We like to think circumstances are totally fortuitous and happen irrespective of us, but that's because we don't see the link. 

What he says is that if you don't deal with your shadow it will appear to you as your fate. That's a very important statement. If you don't deal with your shadow it will appear, sometime or other, as your fate. Your fate is somehow related to the way you are dealing with your shadow. The shadow would be those strategies of the psyche whereby we identify with our reactionary defense system.

Here is another example of your shadow. The woman who is a workaholic finds it very difficult to be peaceful. Do you recognize that in yourself? I do, sometimes. The reason is because she can't stand that woman who is lounging about on the beach munching chocolate the whole time. Laziness would be the shadow of peacefulness. One doesn't want to be peaceful because one doesn't want to be lazy. Another example is mastery. One had difficulty in developing mastery because one doesn't like those ruthless people who don't mind stepping on the toes of people.  

Facetiousness would be the shadow of joy; I can't be joyous because I can't stand these people who are so lighthearted. That's the shadow, those aspects of yourself that you dislike. How is that linked up? There are many theories. Jung got in touch with a Swiss physicist and they came up with a theory in physics of a cone of light, which was quite extraordinary. It goes into metaphysics.

Are things programmed in advance or is the programming random? Do we have free will and in what measure? These are very deep metaphysical questions which the physicists are working with now. That link Jung talked about does not always work. For example, you can't say people are starving in African countries because they are not dealing with their shadow, that their fate comes to them like that. You can't say people in Bosnia are the victims of the war because some of them are not dealing with their shadows. It's just an indication there might be some link we should look into, to see if there is something in us that is causing that situation.
 (Page 5) 
For example, I can tell you a story. Dr. Kubla-Ross asked to visit a prison. She wanted to see the worst inmate, who had killed many people. He was a very strong man, violent! She asked to go in alone, even though  she's a little woman. Now if she had been a priest she would have told him he had to repent, but what she did was ask him to tell her something about himself.  

He said, "I was brought up by a stepfather who was drunk and kept on beating me, and my mother was an alcoholic and kept telling me that I was no good. When I was twelve I left home and the only way to survive was to meet up with a gang of robbers and that's how I made my living."

 She said, "Yes, but they say you killed people." 

"Yes! I hate people!" 
 
Dr. Ross said, "Well, you hate people. You mean, you hate your stepfather or other people?" 
 
"Everyone!" 
 
"Tell me something about your stepfather."
  
He answered, "Well, my stepfather was brought up with his stepfather who was a drunkard and he came home and beat him up."  

So she said, "Can you see that your anger was due to the anger of your stepfather and it will go like that if you don't see what the reason is for your anger? There must be some reason why you hate people."

All of a sudden he saw that and he broke down and cried, and said, "I could never do that again." 

Just imagine.

That brings us back to what I was saying, that we can justify our shadow. You can say this person hurt you so you can't allow this to happen; and naturally there are emotions. "I am reacting." That's very human and where the shadow is, it's right there! It is fear that begets violence. That's the reason for wars.  

What is more, we identify with the shadow. We think, "This is how I am." Perhaps you don't admit it but somehow, surreptitiously we identify with what is just one dimension of our being, which is the most obvious because it is personal, and we think of ourselves as a person, as a discreet entity.
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Now, to break that vicious circle, in our meditation we have to deal with that shadow aspect of ourselves. While you're meditating your sense of being what you think you are is going to generate thoughts that are related to what you think you are. Your problems are always related to what you think you are. That's a vicious circle one is caught in. Meditation will assist in breaking that vicious circle, and the only way to do it is to change your sense of your self-image. That will change your way of looking at your problems.

The Hindu method focuses on questioning our assessment of our problems. It's part of that whole general view that the world is Maya, illusion. Your assessment of your problems is Maya; it's not reliable. For example, if a physicist sees a trace on a screen, he or she might think it is an electron. That is an interpretation, an assessment. In fact, we're not even sure electrons exist. They only have some reality with regard to the whole context, and even probabilities. Our assessment of our problems is guaranteed wrong; that you can take for granted. 

If you accept that, then so what? What are they? The theory of Maya doesn't get you very far, in my opinion. In Sufism the way of looking at things is that those problems are not Maya, they are not illusory.  It's a fact that there's this situation here. For example, in India someone was illustrating Maya and said, "If you're on the road and there's a mad elephant coming, it's not Maya and if you think it's Maya you'll soon find out differently!" That theory really doesn't work. It's negative, but you have to always consider the opposite, the positive aspect of it. This is a Sufi view and really  is very important. If you see that, it makes all the difference. You can say the physical world is made of devices, which gives you a clue as to what is intended behind it.

A very good example is the film E.T. I hope you saw the film and laughed, but I hope you cried, also. Why do you cry? You cry because you saw shadows. There was a very interesting manipulation of your mind by Spielberg. You know E.T. was the head of a turtle, the voice of an old woman, and somehow if you had just seen that, perhaps you wouldn't have fallen for it. The fact is, you saw E.T. through the eyes of that lovely child, and it made E.T. real.

 Awakening One's Potential 

Ordinarily we are used to articulating or rethinking with language, which does impose some constraint upon our thinking. Language is the commonplace way of thinking. We are going to explore alternate ways of thinking that are much more fulfilling, richer, even transcendent. Being in an environment where you can practice meditation in silence is a protection against being interrupted by people who want to chat with you. It is also an opportunity to do something different, to get in touch with your real self and try to awaken potentialities in your being that are calling out to manifest, and to become actuated in your (Page 7) personality. This is the intuition method, and I can only say it works. Because you are not called upon to express your feelings and thoughts in words, you will get much more in contact with those deeper inner forces.  

We are going to pass together through different stages, step by step, leading from the commonplace way of looking at things to what we call awakening. Developing an overview gives you insight into your life and into the programming behind the universe, what it means to you, and your participation in it. It's a process. One shifts one's sense of identity from one's body consciousness into other levels of one's being, for example, one's subtle body, one's aura and one's celestial being. I want you to see much more. I'd like you to plunge into the actual experience.

Each self-image, or identification we have of ourselves corresponds to a setting of consciousness, a mode of thinking, and an emotional attunement. We are going to examine these, passing from one to the other. You could begin by simply observing your breath as you exhale and inhale. Consider it to be not only a function which enables the body to absorb oxygen from the environment and release toxic gases, but as a real exchange of energy. We'll talk about different forms of energy, between your force-field and the force-field of the universe.

Think of it as a kind of ebb and flow. If you do this, you'll find that your breath will slow down, which has physiological and psychological consequences. In physiology one says one shifts from the catabolic to the anabolic stage; you are not ready to spring to action, but you are in a state which lends itself to inner reflection, introspection, and peacefulness instead of being drawn into pain.

As you are breathing, consider that you are actually imbibing, ingesting the universe. Your body is not only feeding on the food of the planet; it is also feeding on the planet. You are ingesting the physical world and processing it. The same thing is true of our psyche. Consider that as you exhale, you are impacting the environment with your being, and therefore on one hand you are ridding yourself of a lot of things that you can't digest. On the other hand you are processing what you ingested so that what comes out of your impact on the universe is the way the universe is fed back into itself through you.

This is true at the physiological level, but what is more important for us is at the psychological level. We realize we are exposed to all sorts of impressions. We could say they are good and bad. We could label them, but that's rather judgmental, and our assessment is not always reliable. Some of the impressions we are forcibly subjected to are deleterious and even damaging. If you meditate, you don't have the challenge of being subjected to the outside world. Consequently, you have to provide some direction to your thoughts and monitor them from inside, which gives you a very highly enhanced awareness.
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 Becoming More Cosmic 

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that we do have an ability to choose those elements from the environment we wish to incorporate in our psyche. We also have the ability to reject those elements from the environment we can't digest, that we can't handle. Normally, that ability to select is overstressed by the impellingness of the impact of the environment without any discrimination.

Unless you are very careful while you meditate, all you would be doing is simply regurgitating the impressions from the outside world. That doesn't get you very far. 
 
The first stage could be illustrated by our body's immune system. There are two immune systems, both of them are based upon the sense of "me" or "not me." For example, the body will not allow the transplant of an organ from another body that is too alien from its own code, its own nature. It's me or not me. It's that sense of me and not me that will give you the ability to select those elements from the environment you wish to ingest and those you wish to reject. 

Just reflect upon this in your life. There are impressions of horror, gross impressions, hatred, violence. We are exposed to all kinds of things which hurt our sensitivity if we entertain high values. We do not know to what extent there is a spillover in us. They cause a reaction which is not always in sync with our real being. We are adapting ourselves to the environment.

The second immune system is capable of adapting itself to the environment so that under special conditions the body tolerates the transplant of an organ that is rather different. If it weren't for the second immune system we wouldn't be able to eat food at all, or we wouldn't be able to adjust to the various bacteria or viruses to which we are exposed. That's true of the physical body.

Applying this model to the psyche, we are strengthened by having to handle impressions that are alien to our nature. The consequence is that we become more and more cosmic and less and less enclosed in our own idiosyncratic nature. One is enriched by being able to integrate in one's self elements of the environment that are more and more alien to one. If one has the capacity to integrate them, one becomes more cosmic, all-encompassing, and that is what we are doing in meditation.

 (Page 9) 

Removing the Mask

Imagine that you want to get to know a person better and you go meet that person. You speak with and even hug that person, but the amount of understanding between you is limited by your language, your identity, until something magical happens. All of a sudden you are sitting there beyond time and space and there is such a sense of attunement that the affinities between you are much more important than the differences. That would be a case of your switching over from the compliance way of experiencing to this deeper mode.

 With deeper experience in meditation you realize you don't have to go visit that person. If you do, you could be caught up in more external things: the physical aspect of the person, their situation and so on. In your meditation you can reach into the soul of that person; you can get in sync with and be enriched by their attunement, perhaps in a more rewarding way than if you had gone to visit.  

Think of someone like that. If you turn within yourself you find there are many beings who are so much a part of your being it is very difficult to establish a line of demarcation, a frontier; there is so much osmosis at that deep level. At the surface there are clear boundaries, outlines, profiles, discreet entities. At the depth there is much more of a sense of community, a deep relationship. 

Silence is magical. If one isn't used to it one doesn't know how to deal with it. You are not forced to be on the alert outside, to react to people and exchange at the surface, sometimes having to justify or validate yourself. One is free from things that draw one to the surface. The way to communicate with people is through the glance. You can greet a person through the glance, and communicate a deeper sense of meaningfulness than could come through your words, just by whatever comes through your glance. Here is your real attunement, your intention, thoughts, emotions, all coming through in your glance.  

I think of our being as composed of several concentric layers. Normally we only identify with the peripheral layers, never really knowing our real being behind it. I say our real being, because our outer layers overlap with  the environment. There is a lot of spillover from the environment that distorts what we really are, but we don't know it because we identify with it. A good example is the voice of Caruso that was badly distorted by the technology of the time. Now it is possible to retrieve the pure voice of Caruso by reversing the distortion. That means that our real being is hidden within these distortions, still there. There is (Page 10) overlap between all the layers and once you discover the deeper layers you have a totally different sense of who you are. Consequently your interaction with the environment is going to be very different and hopefully more productive, more constructive and less counter-productive. That is the secret of really fulfilling the purpose of one's life.

These inner, primeval layers are pure in their original state. For example, when I look into the eyes of a baby I am so deeply shattered by the spontaneity, the beauty, the innocence, the authenticity, the germane nature that is unadulterated and undefiled by the impressions of the Earth. I think we all started in life as naive idealists. We believed in beauty and splendor and life is going to be very exciting and hunky-dory, then somehow we get hurt. One is let down by someone. One can't believe it; one trusted that person so much and even one is abused to such an extent that one finds it difficult to uphold one's ideal. One falls into the space between one's objectives and one's motivations. 

One of the practices of the Sufis is to get very clear as to what you really value and then what your motivations are. Most people will accept that one's motivations don't always match one's ideals. The purpose here is not to give one a sense of guilt. When you are sitting in meditation and turning within, the emotional impact of your circumstances erupts with great power. You can't control it with your will, but it is important to know exactly what's happening. We are provided in our nature with some kind of protection. It's very inadequate how we protect ourselves from the inroads of those undesirable situations in our relationship with people. 

The trouble is one of the most typical attitudes towards a difficult situation is, "attack is the best form of defense." One develops a kind of aggressivity, which is difficult to admit to oneself, and it manifests as one's anger or resentment; even spitefulness. The psyche provides one with crutches that enables one to live with that constant assault on one's self-esteem, just like smoking cigarettes. One gets a support from an artificial agent that doesn't really belong to one, so that one could even parade a kind of aggressivity to cover one's vulnerability. These are strategies the psyche uses, but one identifies so much with the kind of persona one develops in order to provide a bastion of protection against one's sensitivity, one has lost a sense of who one is. There is a feeling of defilement. It is only the peripheral zones of one's being that have become defiled. If one turns within one discovers the immaculate core of one's being and that is one more reason to turn within, to discover one's real self. 

Just think to yourself that you have been playing a role in life, wearing  a mask, and identifying with both that role and the mask. You thought you knew who you are and there are things about yourself you don't like. Those are exactly the strategies of the psyche that doesn't know better and is providing you with (Page 11) either a line of attack or a line of defense. 

There are two approaches here. One the one hand there is a shield, or masquerade; and on the other hand there is something like a dressing for the wounds. The shield would be detachment and indifference, which is the way of the sanyassin; but the ascetic is not fully living, not involved in life. It is not the answer. For example, cancer patients are given an anesthetic, and they are not totally themselves anymore. 

If one would take away the protection one would have terrible psychological withdrawal symptoms. If the protection leads to self-denigration and guilt, it is counterproductive, demeaning, and of course it becomes an abyss of despair that keeps you away from validating your real being. Unfurling all the wonderful potentialities of your being seems to be arrested by the attention you give to this peripheral area of your being. Meditation is a wonderful opportunity of digging below the surface so you are able to recognize the reality of your being.

 Digging Below the Surface 

How does one deal with these extra remnants one has borrowed from the environment? In early childhood one doesn't see it; it comes with the interaction with the environment. One shouldn't rid oneself of this protection, but it can be gradually replaced by elements from inside you that will be able to take over from that crutch. Are you able to gradually learn how to walk without crutches? Can you withdraw instead of just stopping smoking all of a sudden, so you can develop the ability to realize you don't need that crutch anymore? Something in your own self-esteem gives you the ability to not depend upon an outer device.

There are two methods. I favor the first one, which is sublimating an idiosyncrasy one does not feel comfortable about. For example, you carry resentment and it is no use forcing yourself to forgive a person. It doesn't work because you have to go through the process. You can't just do it like that, all of a sudden.  In alchemy it would be in the nature of sublimating or transmuting rage into outrage. See the difference? With rage you are reacting personally, whereas with outrage, you're not personally involved. You are outraged because you hear what the Nazis did to their victims; that is outrage. 

Experiments with psychopaths have shown there is a very serious derangement  in the sparking of the nerve cells in the brain. Somehow one's way of thinking affects the patterns of the exchange of energy between the nerve cells, the pathways. The way the brain works is holistic; you could change the pattern by working with the mind, or you could change the mind by working with the physiological side, both ways. Once you know that, it seems ridiculous to blame (Page 12) people for hurting you when they can't help it because it's a developed pattern in their being due to all kinds of circumstances you can't always know. That is one way of looking at it. 

I met a lady who knew my sister Noor, who was beaten to death in a concentration camp during the Resistance in France. She said the Nazis used to enjoy hearing their screams when they were beating them, so they decided not to scream. She said there is a point at which you don't really feel the pain anymore; you do some kind of astral projection. That's an extreme case of the way of thinking that would give one some kind of detachment and indifference with regard to the harmful impact of people upon one. 

We can also learn from the sanyasin in India, the way of the ascetic. I think we all have in us both things: a desire to involve ourselves in life, which means curtailing our freedom, and a desire for freedom. Sometimes we interpret that desire for freedom as a longing to be free from the circumstances, until we realize we'll probably fall into another pattern that will be just as bad. That's not the answer. We find freedom in our way of thinking, or actually, a deep freedom in ourselves. That freedom will somehow help you to overcome the pain of the misbehavior, people abusing you, harming you, humiliating you, undermining and subjugating you with their tyrannical power and so on. That's one way.  

There is another way that's a little more subtle and a bit difficult to understand. One's notion of one's individual self develops a will, an ego. You could have an aggressive ego which enlists the egos of others and you find you get into more and more conflict. Then you can sublimate it, follow the method of not identifying yourself with the peripheral area that has been affected. Go to the deeper areas where you cannot be affected but are still in you, and then your will is not tyrannical, but is what is called Divine Will. When Christ said, "Thy will be done," that's what He meant. That will becomes sublimated as love. It is a very great power to love someone despite their doing one harm. It's very powerful. That's what Christ was doing. It's almost the ultimate power so that one's will becomes love. My father, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, said in his instructions to leaders, representatives in the Sufi Order, that we are tested in our love, not in our power. Love is a power. Perhaps it's the ultimate answer to deal with those crutches you need until you don't need them anymore.  
 
The other answer is compensating, highlighting the opposite quality to one's defect. For example, I find that people who have been punished because they owned up, like children at school, are either afraid of being up-front and telling the truth, or they become devious and manipulative. That is the way the psyche deals with an unfamiliar or threatening situation, and it takes a lot of courage to say you don't mind being punished to be truthful. We incur a lot of stress in our lives, and sometimes it's very difficult to change those patterns. In (Page 13) that case, the defect could be compensated by being truthful at whatever cost. That is the way of compensating a defect by the antidote.

These are the kinds of things you'll initially encounter when you are meditating, and we want to learn how to deal with them so we don't keep on turning in circles and continually regurgitating our resentment or our guilt. You can't simply dispense with those strategies in the periphery of your being, but you need to find a power inside that does not react to the environment. You could have both. You could see at the periphery that you have these traits in your being and you don't like them, yet not see how you could not have anger, because you might think you are spineless.

In meditation we hope to discover who we really are behind that particular mask. We wear that mask and identify ourselves with it, so we are not used to discovering a truer identity in our being. When you look into the mirror you see that mask. That's why it's important to remember that which transpires behind that which appears. You could identify with your inner face rather than your outer face, and sometimes it can be very different from the outer face. That's what I'd like you to do now as you meditate. Think: "I got myself caught up in a false sense of identity and lost a sense of who I really am that is present within this distortion." There is no way of qualifying it and just saying you have these qualities. You just have a sense of, this is me! This is my real being! You'll see that your real being is really an expression of those things in life which you value. Your motivations were upset by countering the attack from outside. You had doubted who you are because you were resorting to a whole defense mechanism which was enlisted by the harm done by others. Now you find your real being is back again.  

The next step would be to think of yourself as dynamic rather than static. The seed bed of your personality unfurls, just like the seed of a plant unfurls as a plant and culminates into the flower. The personality would be like the flower and behind that is a whole support system, a whole matrix of root and seed one never really knows. Your personality is not you; it's just the outcome of the whole thing, which includes the roots, matrix, and the seed. This is creativity.  

I want to emphasize here the difference between therapy and creativity. In  talking to psychotherapists, I find some are not just into therapy; some are into creativity. The thought of healing is a kind of projection we have and we take for granted that a disturbed situation should be returned to the way it was before. That's inertia. I remember a young lady when I was at the university in a psychopathology course. She said doctors were trying to pull her back to where she was before, because that's where they are at. They had no idea where she was at, and she said she couldn't possibly return to the way she was before. "I can only go out by a different door than the way I came in." 
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Therapy is some kind of a misconception. It would be more productive to think one can turn the tables on a defect. A defeat can reverse itself to be a victory. An example would be people who are in some way handicapped, like Dr.  Stephen Hawking, who developed  a level of intelligence he probably would not have developed if he had all the faculties of his body. Instead of deploring the situation by being in despair because you can't get out of it, or because if you tried to get out it would cause too much pain, consider this is a wonderful opportunity  to open a new door in your life. I don't mean change the circumstances, but if you change, things are going to change. If you can't change your circumstances you change yourself, then circumstances will change. Iif they don't, they will appear meaningful instead of disastrous. One's complacent mind doesn't see meaningfulness, it sees incongruity. 

It would be simplistic to say if we are not challenged we will never develop our potentialities; of course there's no doubt about that. Consider the situations in your life as catalysts that are going to encourage the deployment of qualities in your being that lie in wait. How do you awaken  those dormant qualities so they become activated as your personality? Imagine how you could be if you would be as you might be. 

It is a projection into the future that is a freeing from the past. In a very simplistic way of thinking, we think in terms of causality, just like the Newtonian physicists did; we think a situation is the result of a previous situation. We think the way we are now is a result of the past. If you look at the sea, for example, you see one wave after the other and each wave seems to be a continuation of the same wave that emerges again. If you know something about physics, you realize the whole ocean emerges as each wave.

 The Instant of Time 

There are two things: one is causality, the causal chain; and the other is the continually recurrent emergence of new dispensations in the universe as creativity, like the birth of a star, for example. It is not determined. Think of your past as a way in which you can be creative. We could define the parameters for turning within by the insight into the different dimensions of time, like becoming: the past continues in the future, we are mortal, we get older and so on. For example, our concept of the moment, what do we mean by "now?" If you are listening to music, the notes you just heard continue to resound in your ears while you hear the next note. There is an overlap between the past and the present; that's what is called the moment. There are no frontiers to the moment, no boundaries towards the past or towards the future; it emerges both ways. The instant of time breaks the continuity, so that something new can emerge which will alter the trend of that continuity.
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When you are doing  your breathing practices, you start by alternating inhaling and exhaling. Do a practice in which you hold your breath between inhaling and exhaling. Just think of a pendulum that pauses at the end of its swing to the left and its swing to the right. That would be a very good illustration of the instant of time. Time is not linear; it is just like space, a landscape by gravitation. Time can grind to a stop and restart again. If you do that you are creating situations that are favorable to your rebirthing. Breath acts as a metronome, and gives us the sense of the passage of time. We slow down the metronome of our breath and our sense of the passage of time changes. If you stop your breath, hold it, you lose your sense of the process of becoming, the passage of time. All of a sudden there is a sense of suspense and in that state of suspense, the instant of time acts as a sword that cuts the guilt of the past and the prefiguration of the future.  

If we go to the language of psychology instead of the language of philosophy, one's guilt always refers to the past. The past continues as present, but it's related to the past. How can one find absolution from one's guilt? By asking forgiveness? Asking to be taken off the hook? Forgive one's self? It would be too easy if one could just forgive oneself. Imagine you turn a new leaf; you have a new start. There is a break in the continuity of your life. How can one break that continuity?  By making a pledge. A pledge is what makes a knight, and the pledge is, "I will not do this anymore," or "I will do this." It marks a sudden change of tack in your life. That's the instant of time. 

We don't understand all these laws, but it is true that if there was no way of being absolved from one's guilt, one would be damned forever. If you just observe the law of causality, karma; you can't compensate. To do good deeds is not to compensate bad deeds. There is no way. That's an old-fashioned way of looking  at things. There is a retroactive effect upon the past  by your pledge. You've broken the continuity of the causal chain, but only if you hold your pledge. Never make a pledge if you can't hold it, because that is very demeaning. 

Let's do a Yoga breathing practice. Put the thumb of your right hand under your chin and the middle finger of your right hand close to your right nostril. Don't press against your nostril yet. Place the palm of your left hand on the back of your right hand and the thumb of your left hand in the proximity of your left nostril, and for the moment don't press. Exhale through both nostrils, inhale through both nostrils. Again, exhale through both nostrils, inhale through both nostrils and now hold your breath, pressing both fingers, then exhale through both nostrils. Now simply press the middle finger of your right hand on your right nostril, breathe in through the left nostril, release your thumb, press your thumb again so you hold your breath, and exhale through the right nostril.  Now inhale through the right nostril, hold your breath, exhale through the left nostril. Once more, inhale through the left nostril; think of a pendulum that has (Page 15) moved to the extreme end of its swing. Now hold your breath, the pendulum is in suspense, and exhale through the right nostril. The pendulum starts moving the other way. Start again, as you inhale through the right nostril the pendulum is swinging toward the end of its swing; hold the breath, then exhale through the left nostril. Now just breathe normally. Think of the left and right in the pendulum, and you have the past and the future.

Just observe how you feel when you hold your breath.You are in a state of suspense and that is a time which is the most favorable to bringing about a change. For example, if an airplane has slowed down to a certain point, it will start stalling. Another example is the faster a ship sails, the less it is subjected to a disturbing wind. There are moments in your life when you find yourself in a state of suspense, in a crisis situation where it won't go any further the way it has been so far. You don't know yet how you are going to change, but this is the moment when you can bring about a change, whereas if your life is following its normal pace  it's much more difficult to bring a change. In a crisis situation you can bring a change, because the given situation has been disturbed. Consider that at that moment when the process of time, the arrow of time, has been suspended, you make a change in your life. It doesn't mean the circumstances; it might be in your way of thinking. Somehow you made a pledge and from that moment you have changed circumstances. You could choose this moment to make a pledge as you hold your breath, but  be careful, don't force yourself to make a pledge unless you are ready for it.  

It is something like a yacht changing tack, a sudden change from one state to the other, that's the instant it happens. You'll observe from the moment you've made a pledge, you are a different person. You have strengthened yourself and proceed by leaps and bounds. That will have an impact on the environment. 
 
Now the other way around, in a state of suspense, the instant of time acts like a sword that will cut the guilt of the past and the prefiguration of the future. We need to plan, but do you realize that your planning sets limitations on your freedom? If you are breathing in through the right, for example, in the instant of time you need to free yourself from your dependence upon your projections for the future. We need to plan, but at the same time, we need to find freedom from our planning. It might have to be quite different from what one had forseen or predicted. Be ready for that to happen, for fresh dispensation. 

Now breathe in through both nostrils first, hold your breath and then exhale through both nostrils. Can you see that the past continues to have an effect upon the present? Much of that effect is interrupted by your pledge. Your prefigurations of the future does affect your way of thinking in the present, however, your pledge has altered those prefigurations and you are suspended between the past and the future in the instant of time. This is a situation that is (Page 17) supportive to the emergence of a new dispensation from within, creativity. 

Imagine you don't have to be the way you were, you don't have to schelp your old being throughout your life. You don't have to be as you predicted either,. Something spontaneous arises from within because somehow the organisms of nature have a way of self organizing themselves. If you don't interfere with your will in that state of suspense a self-organizing power unfurls into new qualities; rebirthing takes place in your being. You discover yourself to be a changed person.

Previously we tried to find out who we are, and we find who we are becoming as new dispensations emerge continually from within. I could illustrate this by a flower. The fresh petals are trying to unfurl, but they require space, and can only unfurl if the jaded petals fall apart. Think of yourself as an on going creative process whereby something new is continually emerging, and the periphery of your being begins to dissolve. The power of your new being frees you gradually from your dependence upon those strategies of the psyche that hold you, because you find the power to deal with the challenge of life in yourself, in your deeper self. This emergence of a new self couldn't find the way you were before, but you have to hold that new sense of identity. You nourish the energy that is continually unfurling; otherwise an inertia will set in. For example, a lot of fresh petals are still-born because they didn't have the proper nourishment or protection from the sun or the water. The same is true here; those fresh qualities need your support and part of your support is really identifyiing with them. "This is me, not me static, but me as I am becoming and I am new, different."

Now, when you get back to meeting your friends, they still have this image of you and their projections upon you; what they used to think you are is going to stand in the way of your giving vent to the new being in you. That's why its important to say to people, especially someone very close to you, "I'm a new person! You might laugh, but maybe you're a new person too. We're not the same people as we were so we have to start anew."

We have to honor the way we are evolving. That means the view that person has of you is not going to stand in the way of your free will to become what you are becoming, unless you want to conform to the image people have made of you. That is counterproductive.  

If you're in love with life, you don't want to escape from the drama of life, but you are so shattered by what it all means to other people and to yourself. You don't have to wait for ecstasy in the higher spheres; you find it right here. "Ecstasis" in Latin means outside or beyond the status quo. Every time there is a movement of freedom and one frees oneself from schlerosis, the status quo, there is an outbreak of joy. That's why ecstasy starts with joy.


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Expanding Your Consciousness

The first stage in mediation consists in expanding your consciousness. We do this with our eyesight; for example, you may be reading a book, and then alternately looking at the landscape, a large panorama. You are modulating your glance, and you can toggle between one and the other. You can do the same thing with your consciousness. You can extend your consciousness with your exhale and it becomes all-encompassing. As you inhale, your consciousness seems to converge into a focal point. Perhaps you notice this has an immediate effect upon your sense of identity. As you exhale, your sense of identity becomes more and more cosmic, and as you inhale, it becomes more personal, more individual. 

What do I mean by that? Once more we have to borrow a paradigm. It's very helpful that we can borrow scientific paradigms to understand better what is happening to us in our inner processes. I am talking about the holistic paradigm. You are not just a fraction of the totality of the universe. Inasmuch as the universe is fractionated into what Koestler calls sub-wholes, each sub-whole carries the totality potentially within it. That's the holistic paradigm.  

It just depends upon our sense of identity.  The commonplace sense of identity is me as a separate entity and you as a separate entity and so on. That's the usual, rather simplistic way of thinking. Adopt this holistic paradigm and you begin to grasp dimensions of your being that you were unaware of. Eventually you can discover the universe in you, potentially that is latent, virtual. You feel a nostalgia for that many-splendored bounty that emerges as your being. It's the way the totality is present in each relative fraction of the totality.  

So we have that ability to toggle, to alternate between losing our sense of personal individuality and the sense we have of merging with the totality. On the exhale, we lose our sense of identity, our individuality, and as we inhale, we recover our sense of uniqueness. Some of the Eastern schools have been criticized, particularly by psychotherapists, because those methods make one tend to lose one's personal ego, the sense of the uniqueness of one's being. One could say that's what the whole of life is about. The totality is appearing in the part and each part is absolutely unique. The beauty is alternating between the two, because then we are able to converge more and more of the totality into our being, or coming through as our being. We never totally lose sight of our ego self or individual self, but we also avail ourself of extending, expanding beyond the constraint of our rather inadequate self-image. We discover potentialities that will only emerge if we stop setting boundaries to our sense of identity.
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As you inhale you recover your sense of individuality and your ability to make a selection of the elements you wish to incorporate in your being, and those that you do not. When you merge with the totality you have lost your sense of discrimination.

 The Choreography of the Galaxies 

We could carry this a little further. If the sky is clear you could meditate at night under the stars as I've done myself. 
The galaxies are a little form on the shoreless sea. We came whirling out of nothingness. The stars dance and form a circle, and in the middle we dance. The atoms are perplexed in their choreography. And it is all God, turning around Himself.
Jelaluddin Rumi  
So the galaxies, let's say the cosmos, represent a very small fraction of the total ocean of reality that you could call the universe. I make a distinction between the word universe and cosmos. The cosmos is the way the universe is actuated in the existential state as the stars, the galaxies.

This is a poetic expression that does something to one's mind and makes one realize to what extent one has become encapsulated into one's little world that seems so important. One has lost sight of the magnitude in which we are merely willy-nilly involved. Our awareness of our participation in the choreography of the galaxies will help us reach out from the limited purview of our commonplace thinking. Our thinking starts to become cosmic.

I'll give you an example. Einstein was pushing a pram in New York. Lots of people push prams in New York. Somehow, as he was doing it, he was envisioning the planet as whirling within the solar system, and the solar system as just a small part of the Milky Way, and so on. He saw himself in the context of the totality. Another clue is given by the poet who noticed the relationship between the flicker of a star and the flutter of your eyelids, or the sparkling of your eyes. Most people are simply caught in themselves, what they think of as themselves, which is not what they are. It's just a limited sense that we have of our identity.

I would consider this the first step in what we call awakening. We could bring this even closer if we would spend some thought on the fact that our bodies, at least the fabric of our bodies, erupted at the moment of the Big Bang. The physical cosmos has fashioned itself into us. If you think of it then you reconnect with the totality, exactly as one would recharge a battery. The battery would run down if it has been disconnected too long from its charger. So, think of it like (Page 20) that. It does something to you by reestablishing the connection at the physical level, and I suspect it does something to your body, too. It recharges the cells of the body as well as reconnecting.

The consequence is you will at least be able to accept that our thinking is really linked with the thinking of the universe. You could think the universe is a being that is able to think and is aware, and your thinking and awareness is part of the awareness of the whole universe. In other words, you are connecting up your thinking with its source, which is very important, because otherwise if you are meditating you are simply caught up in your personal thinking. What we want is to bring about a dramatic change in our way of thinking. Otherwise, you're just going around in circles; you're not gaining anything by introspection.

 Filtering Impressions 

When we ingest food, we reject parts that we cannot ingest, and then there's a further rejection in our excrement. We are filtering the material that we are imbibing.  The same thing is true of the psyche. As you inhale, imagine that you are setting up protective thresholds, "sentinels at the doors of perception," as Buddha says. Those sentinels will allow certain things to pass and others not. That means you really have the ability to reject impressions as you are meditating; to boomerang them back, like a ball that rebounds, or water off the back of a swan. The Hindus call that vairagya, which is a measure of freedom. This measure of freedom is determined by our ability to be indifferent and independent of those things we do not want to be impacted by, or things we don't want impinged upon us, like for example addiction of any kind. Freedom. It is your need for freedom that will protect you from those impressions that are disturbing, so when you meditate you're able just to cogitate on those things that are enriching.  

That selection is not that easy because of the forcefulness exercised by circumstances on our consciousness. For example, if  you have just gone through a dramatic crisis in your life, you can't just sit there and think about the stars because those circumstances act so compellingly upon your consciousness. Also, one tends to get stymied by situations one is unable to change, so one does wonder whether meditation could help in any way, or how it could help.

There are several thoughts here. First of all, I am thinking of the situation illustrated by Beethoven in the Fourth Piano Concerto, where he describes the world as the orchestra and himself as the pianist. The world comes to him with a big wallop, "Ba-bom, Ba-bom," and he reacts, "hummmm dumm, dum, ta tum...." It's a very clear case of not reacting, of saying, "I won't play ball with you," because if you do, you are not mastering all the potentials of your being. It is like saying, " I place a buffer between the challenges of life and all the potentials in (Page 21) this being. I have to interrogate myself. I don't want to react. I will respond, but I don't want to react."  
  
That's the first thing. So, when you are meditating, you can think of that challenge: the world is trying to force you into reacting and when you reacts you short-circuit your potential. For example, if you are crossing a road and there's a car there, you don't have to use all your wisdom to step back. It's in the cortex of your brain. When you have to decide something that is going to be decisive for your life, then of course you have to call upon all the faculties in your mind, and not just in your mind. Think of meditation as a chance to place a buffer -- and that does not mean a barrier -- a buffer between the challenges of the world and yourself.  

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The Change of Perspective

Now we are going to turn the tables, and start being more aware of our impact upon the circumstances. Just do that for a moment. I want to point out that the circumstances are still there, but they act as catalysts. You reduce their effect upon you by using them as catalysts to spark your own creativity. The creativity of your personality is to unfold potentialities in your being. In that piece of Beethoven, you will find that as a consequence, there's dialogue between the challenge of the environment and himself, and eventually he prevails. Out of this arises the most wonderful musical theme, that would never have arisen if it had not been for the challenge of the environment. You don't discard that challenge; you make the best use of it.  

It is true that when one is subjected to a very compelling impression, one fails to see an alternative perspective. For example, if the sun is in the sky you don't see the stars. They're there in the day, but you can't see them. In the same way, our circumstances are like the sun that blinds us from what is being enacted behind the circumstances. Consequently, the only way to go about it in meditation is to downplay one perspective and highlight the other. Here are some examples. If you drew a cube on the blackboard, you could see that it could be one way or the other. You could alternate. All of a sudden one side comes forward and the other back, and then the opposite. You can toggle between the two.  

Let's look at a hologram. There is a hologram in which there are two superimposed images, of Christ for example, and you can toggle. All of a sudden you see one perspective, and then you can see the other. You can change the effect as the cornea acts as a lens. We change the convergence of that lens, the concavity of that lens, and we can shift the effect.

This is what we do in meditation. Of course, it is important not to just dismiss one perspective as illusory. It's a way of looking at things which makes the ascetic. You could make use of it; in fact you could borrow it. But be careful with that method because it is one-sided. Any physicist knows that the world is not the way it looks. In the same way your problems are not the way they look. We want to know what is being enacted behind our problems, rather than just saying we've been misassessing them.  

We are grappling with our concepts of our problems, our interpretations of our problems, rather than with the problems themselves. We generally only see our problems from our personal vantage point. For example, if you look at Notre Dame in Paris from one vantage point, you haven't seen Notre Dame, (Page 23) because each vantage point is different. That's the way we're assessing our problems from a personal vantage point. We're so convinced that's the way they are, we carry this interpretation of our problems throughout our lives. That's a false assessment of our life that we carry in our psyche. Just imagine! 

 Perspective on our Problems 

The purpose of meditation is to see our problems from other perspectives than our own. The first method would be to think of a problem, a real bad problem. I think everybody has some kind of problem. I've never met anybody who doesn't. You notice that problems always involve our relations with people, unless it is our relations with matter, like for a carpenter or electrician and so on. Relationships. Ordinarily in a social problem, there are several people involved in a situation, and of course it is very exceptional if everybody agrees, because everybody has a different point of view and different values, and they act accordingly.  

Instead of just jumping to conclusions or being convinced that you're right and the other person is wrong, try to get into the consciousness of that other person. One can do that. If you've started expanding your consciousness as we did, for example, into the starry skies, you develop a skill of being able to transfer the center of your consciousness, the vantage point, into another person's consciousness. You can see how they think and feel about this problem. Now, maybe they told you, maybe they didn't tell you, and maybe they don't even know themselves.

To be able to do that, you really have to get into the consciousness that person has of themselves, not just their view on the problem. There is a Sufi motto, that says, "I see him/her through his/her eyes. I try to imagine what it would be like to be him or her." And of course the reciprocal would be, "He/She sees me through his or her eyes, and if I pick up the impression that he/she has of me, I may realize how very different it is from the impression that I have of myself." I don't say that my view is right and theirs is wrong, or theirs is right and mine is wrong, but that two perspectives are better than one. For example, we have two eyes, and consequently there are two images, and our brain is able to extrapolate between those two images and make a three-dimensional picture of it. It's called parallax.  

We also have the ability to extrapolate between our own sense of identity, our self-image, and the self-image somebody makes of us. We can extrapolate the representation we have of the other person with the representation they make of themselves. Now you see the connection between the being of that person and the problem.
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Now look at yourself. First of all, could you see the effect of your personality upon your problem, rather than the effect of your problem upon your self? Can you see that the problem is not a problem irrespective of yourself? You are involved in it, and that means your personality. Likewise, the personality of that person is involved in the problem, too. Now, bring in the third person, and a fourth person, and more and more people, so that would be like looking at Notre Dame from several vantage points at the same time. You'd have a far better appreciation of Notre Dame than if you were just seeing it from one angle. 

 Perspective on our Self-Image 

The same thing would apply to your own self-image. Imagine that you are able to collate the vantage points of many people about your own self and extrapolate between them. You have a rather incongruent admixture of opinions that are contradictory, and yet somehow the reality seems to emerge out of that incongruence.

I will give you an example from the book of Kahlil Gibran called Jesus the Man. You have all these different people saying how they saw Jesus. Every one is totally different, absolutely contradictory, but when you bring them all together, you have a picture of Jesus that you couldn't have from just reading the Bible, although it's important to read the Bible too.  

In the same way, there is a great diversity and richness of vantage points that tally, although sometimes they seem absolutely opposite. For example, Dr. David Bohm was one of the greatest physicists who became one of the greatest philosophers of our time. He suggested an experiment. Imagine you have two cinema-cameras, and you film fish in an aquarium from both sides at the same time. If you were to view those two films side by side simultaneously, they would be very different, yet you would see there is some connection between them. This is what I mean by the sense that you get out of collating several vantage points. That makes all the difference. 
That which I am looking for is looking at me.
St. Francis of Assisi 
In physics we know the investigating subject alters the function of the electron by looking at it, yet we don't know what the electron is like if we don't look at it. Your view of your problem has a distorting effect because you are somehow impacting it by your view. It's wonderful to learn how to question one's vantage point, and that represents exactly the first stage in the steps leading to samadhi in Yoga. In Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the first step is to question your assessment of your problems. The second step is to really look at them as though (Page 25) they are looked upon as they are, rather than looked upon by you. Do away with psychological projections upon the problem.

A simplistic mind is reactionary; it is reacting rather than just interpreting, but it is reacting on the strength of one's interpretation. When you are meditating, you realize that thoughts impinge upon your mind from outside, because the world is not transposed within you. That which was actual, circumstantial, makes up the elements of your psyche now, and has an impelling effect upon your consciousness. They force your consciousness into looking at them, seeing them.  

We could do a practice to prepare ourselves for this. Think that your glance is made up of two beams of light, like the head lamps of a car. Our retina does not just absorb light from the environment, it fluoresces or emits light, because there's a lot of light in the brain. Concentrate very strongly on those two headlights with your eyes closed. Now, open your eyes, and immediately the environment will force your glance into focus so you see the objects in front of you, and you've lost your sense of the beams of light that are emitted from your eyes. 

Close your eyes again, and concentrate a little more intensely on the power of your glance. Those searchlights are cast upon all things; you're looking upon the darkness and it is not the light of the environment that is hitting your retina, but the light of your glance that is hitting upon the objects. Open your eyes now, and the physical world looks like a blur. Normally it's the other way around. Our eyes are usually forced into focus by the objects. If you keep your concentration, everything will look like a blur. Practice with a flower first, then with a person. In time, if you do that day after day for many months, you'll get to the point where you're able to open your eyes for a short while, and see what the Sufis call, "that which transpires behind that which appears."  

I'll illustrate it with the example of the photographs of Walter Chapell, who photographs flowers in ultraviolet light. You can see they look very different from the way they look in ordinary light. One sees a kind of radiance and effulgence, like in Kirlian photography, around the flower. While you still see the profile of the flower, that radiance extends beyond that profile and does not have a profile. Sometimes you can even sense the radiance coming from within the petals, not from just around the petals. 

If you look at people while offsetting your glance from the ordinary setting of consciousness, you might notice two things. One, you might perceive the aura, but that's not what our objective is, and two, you might perceive a kind of expression that is transpiring through the configuration of the face. You know how the same face can look very different depending upon one's attunement. Again, you see what the Sufis mean by "that which transpires behind that which appears."
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We make the next step considering your problems and trying to x-ray them with the light of your understanding. Try to grasp that which is trying to transpire in that problem, rather than that which appears. There are many things which are trying to transpire.  

Let's earmark them. At least one of them might be about determining what the issues are that are enacted in that scenario. For example, the whole problem is there so that eventually truth will become known. That's the issue that is enacted in this problem. Or, the issue is compassion, or orderliness, as opposed to randomness or chaos. Mastery. There are all kinds of issues that we might try to identify. You could say it gives you a sense that there is something trying to transpire in circumstances which make up your problem. If you just judge the problem from its face value, you haven't really grasped the problem, because that's a very perfunctory way of looking at things. There are deeper issues. 

 Perspective from Within 

You will find you can't sort these things out with your ordinary mind. It's an intuitive sense rather than reason, and it's not supported by reason. To do that you will need to shift your sense of identity to your subtle body, rather than your physical body. I talk about the electromagnetic field, or the life field, or the force field. They are not the same thing; they are different ways of looking at it. Think of yourself as a field rather than a composition of particles. Think of yourself as a wave interference pattern, like radio waves, for example, and your body as a hard core within this radio-interference pattern. You'll see connections between facts, events or circumstances that you hadn't seen before. This is because you were looking at things from one vantage point. If you turn within, in what Dr. David Bohm calls the implicate state, you do not refer things to your own sense of your individual self.

Here is an illustration. An eclipse of the sun with the moon is only significant from the vantage point of the planet at a certain point in time and space. The sun and the moon are always eclipsing themselves, and would look eclipsed if they were looked at from some other location in space. Situations are only significant to us when they are seen from our own personal vantage point. We were extending our vantage point a moment ago, and the consequence is that we are able to see situations irrespective of our own personal vantage point. That happens as you turn within.  

The trouble is that if you were meditating, one assumes that meditating means turning within. One sits quietly and the world continues to exist within you, transposed as psychic events. That's introspection and very misleading, because we're so used to thinking we are the subject observing an object other than ourselves. If you turn within, that way of thinking doesn't work any more. (Page 27) You are both the witness and that which you are observing. In other words, you are the subject and the world is none other than yourself. It is yourself you are observing, and you are also the observer. You replace the usual way of experiencing and of thinking by basing your cognizance on a very different principle from that of the dichotomy subject/object. That principle is of resonance, of affinity. It's recognizing something because it matches something within you, that is not other than yourself. Recognize the other in yourself and yourself in the other, an osmosis between beings.

The frontiers that seem to divide us at the surface have dissipated and things look very different. For example, suppose you are swimming at the surface of the lake and you see water lilies. You plunge under the surface and you see it is just a network of roots that emerge as water lilies, but those water lily plants are not discrete entities. They are all linked up together as expressions of the root.

That's what you do as you turn within. Think of the world as the outer manifestation of the implicate state, a reality where everything is intertwined, intermeshed. You are so inextricably intermeshed with all other beings that you experience a different sense of identity that is not based upon your sense of location in space.

For example, if you throw several pebbles into a lake, you'll see individual eddies form on the surface. Eventually these eddies start merging with one another and forming what is called a wave-interference pattern. At some point you lose sight of the individual eddies and think they have disappeared, but each eddy has its own signature, or frequency range. Even though they merge, they still maintain their identity within this admixture. It can be very difficult to understand. Physicists are now able to isolate waves that have merged into a wave interference pattern. In the same way as you turn within, you merge with all beings without really losing your identity. We're not used to thinking that way. It will give you a mode of understanding that is very different from your usual one, because one sees things in their context. See your problem in its context, instead of just seeing your problem.  

I hope you see the difference between this and introspection. In introspection you are the judge, and you think of your thoughts as the observed. Here your own sense of being the subject is expanded; interspersed in the totality. Consequently, you have a very different understanding and your problems involve not only a few people, but in fact the whole universe. So instead of thinking, "These are my problems," you think, "I am involved in the drama that is enacted in the cosmos, and I thought this was my particular problem. It is really my participation in the drama of the cosmos, and in fact I am the consciousness of the cosmos discovering itself as me." 


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Breathing Practices

It's good to start the day in early morning meditation and gradually build up one's energy by using breathing practices. I suggest you start by simply being aware of your breath, inhale, exhale, and just be aware of it without trying to influence it in the least.

You will find that just by being aware of your breath it will slow down, especially if you are in a peaceful mood. It's important to know that you are not just drawing in oxygen from the environment and ejecting toxic gases. You are plugging into the energy field of the planet and eventually the whole universe. There is an exchange between one's own electromagnetic field, or life field, and the electromagnetic field of the planet, called the geoelectromagnetic field, or even the electromagnetic field of the whole universe. This function is enhanced if you are aware of your own magnetism, or electromagnetic field, or life field. It seems to be surrounding the body and also is interspersed within the cells of the body.

Identify with that field instead of your body. One can illustrate it by a balloon that is being inflated as you inhale and deflated as you exhale. Yet there is something rather perplexing, because according to Yoga, as you exhale you contract your abdomen first and then your chest, but while you do this you expand your life field. This convergence occurs together with the dilation of your abdomen and chest.

Now, you might recognize several modes of breathing: inhale through the nose out through the nose, inhale through the nose out through the mouth, inhale through the mouth out through the nose, inhale through the mouth out through the mouth. Let us examine each one of these in turn.

 Earth Breath 

The usual way of breathing is in through the nose, out through the nose. This is considered by the Sufis as the baptism with earth, in the alchemical process. It is the first stage in the process of catharsis, of purification. So, imagine that as you exhale, your force field or electromagnetic field is drained, either through the bottom of your spine or the soles of your feet, into Mother Earth, who very kindly accepts this pollution and recycles it. When you inhale you are drawing in earth energy that has undergone this process of dialysis.  
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You feel integrated with fresh energy as you inhale after having cleared a lot of dross. In fact, now you could start by exercising some measure of will power to extend your exhaling. Normally we only use one fifth of the capacity of our lungs, so this would be an opportunity of really voiding your lungs of a lot of static gasses that have become congested. Then you find you can inhale much more deeply, in fact you can refill your lungs now with much more oxygen than ever before.  

The same is true of your psyche. Think of those elements in your psyche that you are unhappy or, uncomfortable with, and which you would like to drain, just like the toxins of the body are drained by the lymph system into the kidneys. This is just like a drain in your bathtub. It works both ways, draining the physical pollution and the psychological pollution at the same time. It's good to be able to associate these two as you exhale.  

As you inhale you may find you are drawing in fresh energy from the earth. We are continually imbibing the psychological environment, and if there has been a clearing, one is able to ingest the psychological environment more effectively. As a matter of fact, the earth element in alchemy is used as a filter. The heavier elements are pulled downwards by the gravitational pull, and then there is a kind of counter-force that we call buoyancy. You might find that those psychological aspects of yourself that you are not comfortable with tend to wear you down. Think of a psychological gravitational pull. Then, the other way around, there is a kind of buoyancy in the sense of being freed of the ballast of those elements of the psyche that one would like to get rid of that one cannot combat by one's will.  

If you are familiar with Sufi practices the two Wazaif you could make use of here are Subhan, and Muhyi. Subhan as you exhale and Muhyi as you inhale.  

Each of the four elements defined by alchemy have their psychological connotations. I'm sure you'll confirm that if you think of the earth it gives you a sense of support, reliability, responsibility, being consequential, being germane. You think of people you can really count on, and you want to be amongst those who can be relied upon. For example, in a team, each person takes responsibility for each other. So, one wants to reestablish a covenant with the earth as the Native Americans do. She will provide you with your nourishment if you respect her and give to her, satisfy her basic needs, which are less exacting than your own. Of course, it will require what is called husbandry. You will have to tend her with care and consistency in an ongoing way.  Thus, the earth calls upon our sense of responsibility. Communion with the very spirit of the earth will give you a sense of strength, resilience, a kind of sustained power. That is true at all levels, including the psychological level. 
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Corresponding Wazaif are Wasi, the sense of containment in one's responsibility and Muqit, nurturing. As you see, it is a covenant. 

 Water Breath 

Next, inhale through your nose and exhale through your mouth. This is the baptism with water. Your lips are closed and therefore you force the air between the lips, as if you were whistling. It gives you a sense of coolness. You see the energy is clearly oriented, or much more oriented than in the previous one as you exhale. Now, instead of identifying as your body, identify with your electromagnetic field, and you will be aware of the currents of energy, like electric currents, that are flowing within that magnetic field. You will discern an ascending/descending current, alternating, or even parallel.

Again you have this dichotomy between the gravitational pull of the earth and buoyancy of the heavenly spheres, but this time it's not filtering, but washing, an ablution. It's exactly as though you were taking a shower, but imagine that the shower intersperses your body cells, internally. I suppose as you inhale you could think of a fountainhead rising as an artesian spring; and a waterfall descending as you exhale.  

It's a feeling of transmutation, of distillation. Water flows downwards, but in the retort it is distilled and becomes steam as you inhale. It is another step in working with, and preparing one's self for life after life; that is, fashioning the body of resurrection. In the baptism with earth we were dealing with our electromagnetic field, or force field, but here we are dealing with our life field. I am talking about something a little more difficult to grasp.

With this catharsis of your life field, this practice impacts upon your psyche. Let's just try to feel what water means to you in your interface with the planet. The earth gives you the impression of being static, whereas water is much more malleable; it's flowing. While the earth will crack up into an earthquake, water will wind its way between the rocks. One who has a prominent water feature would be more versatile and more adaptable, and certainly more loving and more giving. Earth is already giving, nurturing, but the earth vitalizes. Water has an extraordinary property which chemists know about in the way energy passes from the electron of one atom to the other. There's a flow of energy internally within your body cells. At the psychological level it favors communication, an osmosis in the flow of energy from one being to another. 

Water has a tendency to confluence instead of interspersing. For example, waves form together wave interference patterns, whereas particles will either avoid each other or collide. One is not simply converging the energy of the environment and rebounding it again. One is actually availing one's self of a new (Page 31) dispensation of energy that emerges from within. At this level one is not highlighting the ascending/descending currents, one is highlighting the centrifugal/centripetal ones. That's the kind of attunement that is going to awaken the emergent forces from within. It's a different kind of disposition where you find more willingness to cooperate. You could think of those situations in your life that have become static and you would like to make more flowing, moving. That's the practice of Wahabbo. Then there is love, compassion, willingness to cooperate, to work together, to feel a part of each other, solidarity. For that there is Waddud, which is love, or Rahman/Rahim, magnanimity and compassion.  

 Fire Breath 

Let us try breathing in through the mouth, exhaling through the nose. This would be the baptism with fire. At this point, it's possible for you to identify with your aura, rather than with your magnetic field or life field. That is the bioluminescence, the light you absorb from the environment and transmit to the environment, so the body fluoresces. Think of a central axis within the aura that is like a flame rising in your spinal cord. Notice all the differences in the colors, the frequencies of light that follow in a sequence, a spectrum moving from red to vermilion and orange into gold and green, blue, violet, ultraviolet, colorless light. There is a transition as you inhale through the mouth. You feel that the flame is sucking oxygen out of the environment in order to fuel itself. It is really consuming the environment, but also transforming it in a rather drastic way, so eventually heat is transformed into light. That is the heat element, the infrared is somehow transmuted into the colors of the spectrum and then eventually ultraviolet light.

Now, as you exhale through the nose, feeling you've burnt as an incandescent body, you radiate pure light. Traditionally we call it the transmutation of fire into light. At this point you start being conscious of radiating light from the heart center, but in a second step through the crown, or from the crown outwards. 

Perhaps you notice that breathing in through the mouth has a very different effect than breathing in through the nose. If your lips are as close as they can be while you are sucking in air, the current of air seems to hit the thyroid gland and the heart chakra. It vitalizes the whole combustion process in the body. At the psychological level, it gives you zest. It gives you courage to stand by what you believe in and also courage to be absolutely up front and truthful. Consequently, truthfulness is often associated with a flame that burns intensely; it burns all the impurities. Truthfulness purifies the psyche where there is deviousness and ambiguity. Even within one's aura there is some pollution due to the environment; one's aura is purified and transmuted, and eventually one radiates beautiful light; what the Tibetans call the pure light of bliss. You feel as though (Page 32) you'd had a shower of light, but instead of the shower going down it's going up. The practices for this are ya Haqq and ya Nur. 

 Air Breath 

The last one is baptism with air. You are breathing in through the mouth and out through the mouth. This matches a mode of being that seeks freedom, that tends to disperse. Air will disperse unless it is subjected to some kind of containment, like the gravitational pull of the earth. A sense of a longing for freedom tends to make us defocussed and less open to constraint, and therefore subject to constraint. The features in your character are of the nature of air. There is no way of holding one, even if one's body is in prison, one's mind and one's soul cannot be subjected to constraint. There was a lady who was being lynched in a Southern state, and she said, "You can do what you like with my body; you can't touch my soul."

 Your celestial counterpart gives you a sense of freedom from death, from mortality, a sense of eternity rather than being subjected to the process of becoming. It's an emancipation from the kind of restraint in which we engage ourselves not only factually, but also in our way of thinking or of identifying.  

This is purification in the sense of, for example, not allowing one's self to be held by addiction because one needs to be free. In that sense it would be a purification from a kind of defilement that one incurs by one's interfacing with the psychological environment. Shake off the fetters and you find yourself out of prison. As the Sufis say, "Oh man, if you only knew your freedom; it is your ignorance of your freedom that is your captivity." 

Our ideals, those things that we estimate highly, our mode of thinking, are not based on experience but rather on a kind of innate sense of values, like aesthetics. The celestial within us suffers from the defilement of our earthly condition and acts as a continual reminder of our ideal. That kind of consciousness suffers if not given the appropriate meditation practices. In our attunement with air, our need for freedom will help our consciousness to free itself from the impelling force of experience, the existential state. One discovers modes of thinking that are not based upon experience, but which only arise when, as Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says: 

Consciousness has been voided of its objects and it returns to its ground, which is intelligence.

So, it's a whole different way of thinking. This can only happen if one identifies the subject in one, the witness, with the divine spectator, the One and (Page 33) Only spectator, of which one's ego as the subject is an extension. The ego is limited, focalized and even distorted. The thinking of the cosmos, and the thinking of the universe will eventually overwhelm your personal thinking that is subject to the limitations of the existential state. This leads, of course, to Samadhi.  

The practices here are ya Wahid and ya Ahad. One sense of ya Wahid would be multiplicity in unity. The other is the unity inherent in multiplicity, and by derivation, the solitude of oneness. Ahad means one has lost the sense of multiplicity, and all that remains is the sense of oneness.

 Summary 

This awareness of breath has consequences with regard to our modes of thinking. When one is attuned to the earth, one's mode of thinking is interactive and even reactive. When one is attuned to water, one's thinking is creative, it emerges from within. The third attunement with fire transmutes heat into light and vitalizes the entire combustion process in the body. The flame of truth burns away the impurities in the psyche. The fourth attunement with air, with the whole process of effulgence, radiation and so forth, favors your recollection of having been a celestial being and still being a celestial being now. 

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Awakening

 Actualizing God 

Let us start with a typical Sufi breathing practice. As you exhale, think that your exhaling is an extension of the Divine Exhaling, whereby God descends from the solitude of unknowing about the existential state. God is moved by what is called Ishq Allah; He/She experiences nostalgia which actualizes His/Her vision into existential reality. That splendor may become beauty or may be manifested as beauty and majesty. As you inhale, it's the other way around. Imagine your inhaling is an extension of the Divine Inhaling whereby God draws the quintessence of what has been gained by the existential state back into the programming. It is thereby upgraded and updated, so the quintessence of that which has been gained by experience may be eternized, may avail itself to the universe, like the perfume of flowers. In order to extract the perfume of flowers one needs to drop the dross. Only the essence remains and acquires a certain freedom or detachment from the support system. 

Consider these two very strong motivations in our life: our need for  involvement with people and the kind of know-how that arises out of this, and also our need for freedom. We think it is freedom from circumstances, but really it is freedom from conditioning. For this to happen we need to do exactly what distillers are doing with perfume; we need to cleave to the essence of our being that is eternal, like the perfume. The flowers have a very precarious foothold on the planet earth and they manage to make themselves eternal by transforming into perfume.  

We're working with the body of resurrection and this is the process. We see those two forces. You might recognize in the first one nostalgia, which is translated as desire. I prefer the word nostalgia. It's a kind of joy to find fulfillment in life. The way of the Sufi is not asceticism as in Hinduism, nor the way of desirelessness as in Buddhism. However, one has to be clear what the motivation is behind our motives. If we alienate our sense of identity from our Ground which we call God, then that deep nostalgia could get distorted and work against itself. This is apparent when desire becomes counterproductive and destructive. The clue behind all this is to reconnect ourselves with the totality of which we are the expression.  

Do this as you exhale and inhale so that you start by trying to look at things from the Divine point of view and then work down into your personal point of view, like going down a funnel.
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At first you might think these two tendencies would pull you in opposite directions. The whole idea is to reconcile them, to reconcile the irreconcilables. Somehow we have to actualize that initial drive in ourselves in order to be able to contribute our experience to the know-how of the universe.    

You might be aware of your desire which might lead to covetousness, wanting to make your house beautiful and have a nice car, clothes or whatever. You might desire involvement with people where you are enriched by your interface and interchange with them, and feed on the wonderful things our great civilizations offer us in terms of music, architecture and technology.  

On the other hand, you realize this involvement gives joy, but at the same time at the cost of some measure of pain, and at some moments one has a real need for freedom. One does not know how to find that freedom because at first one thinks it is allowing us to free ourselves from circumstances. So what does it mean to find freedom in oneself? That is exactly what we want to pursue in our spiritual quest. 

 If a word could say it, that word would be awakening. Maybe you can feel that nostalgia in yourself. A saying of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan might trigger off some very meaningful discoveries in you: 
Every planet, every star, every atom, every person has a moment of awakening or is seeking for awakening.
 
You feel the awakening of your awareness beyond middle range is just absolutely knocking at the door and becomes such a need that everything pales as compared with it. You may reach a point where you are suffocating in your ignorance and would like to know how you can one gain more insight.  

There is a secret. We have the example of the contemplatives of many different schools: Yoga, Buddhism, Kabala, Christianity. They are different in many ways, and there is some crossover, some overlap. You see in Yoga an effort of the will to take over the autonomic functions in the body, and also to control the mind. One starts by grounding the will upon one's sense of personal identity, and one gradually shifts one's sense of identity. Eventually it is that attractor that is Atman, the soul of the universe. That is one way of thinking of God, which frees you from the limitation of your personal will. The personal will is overcome. 

You find the same thing in Buddhism, which resembles Sufism. However, in Sufism the notion of the antipodal point of view, or the vantage point of one's own, is absolutely prevalent. If you want to understand Sufism, the thing to do is (Page 36) to understand that one is always seeing things from two antipodal standpoints, one being the point of view of the individual and the other the point of view of God.

 Experiencing God 

The notion of God is very different amongst the contemplatives of Sufis than it is in the outward religion. The Prophet Mohammed gave the outer religion for the masses and in the course of prayer the contemplatives began to have a deep experience beyond their concept of God. 

We make concepts of something that is beyond our understanding and we limit it by our understanding, so somehow if somebody says, "God," we try to understand. What does it mean? Does it mean there is a big man up there with a big white beard, and us miserable worms down here are being manipulated? What do we mean?  

We project what we would like God to be based on what we know of ourselves, so that concept depends upon the degree of our realization and then as Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says:
Mysticism starts by the experience of God rather than the concept.

Our way is not the way of belief but the way of experience. Belief is like the shoehorn. You might say, "But how can you have the experience of God because God, that ultimate reality, is unknowable and cannot be the object of your cognizance?" Here we have the great dilemma. If you see things from two antipodal standpoints, they reflect one another. That's a mirroring effect you find in Sufism. We have to distinguish between those two poles of knowledge; one is acquired knowledge, called know-how by experience, and the other is revealed knowledge.

That's a very different way of looking at things. Somehow the unknown is making itself known instead of thinking that we can know it, that we can acquire that knowledge. For Sufism, the whole of the universe is a revelation of something that can never be the object of our knowledge, because it does not have a form and is not attributable to time and space.

 Awakening God Within 

According to Pir-o-Murshid, the third step after the experience of God is awakening the God within, and that is doing instead of knowing, which is a feature of Sufism. Now, what does it mean, awakening God within?   (Page 37) 
The mind of the universe has been buried in matter and is continually trying to awaken.  
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
People used to think of the body as dust, "dust goes to dust," and after we die the body is just clothing. Instead, imagine that your body is intelligent, that the cells are intelligence. It's a very interesting way of looking at things. That goes with the thought that somehow every atom has a moment of awakening.  

If we are like the branches of a tree, does knowledge of part of the whole contribute toward knowledge of the whole? That would mean the universe awakens in our awakening; instead of saying we are awakening, it is the universe that is awakening in us and as us. Do we benefit by the knowledge that the universe has of itself through us? 
In contemplating Him we contemplate ourselves; in contemplating us He contemplates himself.
Ibn 'Arabi 
That's reciprocity, which is typical of Sufism and which evidences a mirroring effect. The Sufis have this view of what they call the palace of mirrors, mirrors that reflect each other in infinite regress so there's no end.  

That would make us understand what we mean by revelation because there's always the opposite to our understanding; there's some kind of reciprocity. We wonder what implication this has in terms of our experience of the world and of our problems, because they're always there somewhere. When we meditate it is very difficult to wipe out altogether any thoughts regarding our problems. I referred to what has become a metaphysical tenet, but it is really more pragmatic than metaphysical: that Hindu point of view that the world is Maya. It's a mirage, an illusion that is deluding and misleading. The Hindus are saying that you shouldn't rely upon the evidence of the senses, appearances, because it is misleading. To realize it is misleading doesn't get you very far. It's negative.  

The Sufi point of view is very interesting as compared with that point of view because the physical world is made up of clues. These signals are giving you a sense of the reality that is manifesting itself through those clues. You could say you never know God, but you know that clues to that reality are being revealed to you continually. For example, if you see the paw marks of the bear in the snow, you haven't seen the bear; you don't have an experience of the bear but knowledge of the bear. According to the Sufis, the ultimate reality we call God escapes our grasp, but there are clues that lead towards it, and clues that lead us beyond the clues.
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That's the meaning of that which transpires behind that which appears. You can see signals. For example, if we are on planet Earth and perceive signals from outer space it will give us some indication if there are intelligent beings out there. We're listening to signals and perhaps we will follow those clues and try to organize some kind of encounter. The clues lead us beyond the clues, you see. What's obvious here is that we are not just limited by our cognizance, but are opening up to the revelation of the point of view we ascribe to God which is revealed to us, but which we cannot acquire. 

We mustn't think that God is up there and we and the universe are other than God. The cosmos is the body of the one Being that is the universe. We have this challenging paradox of the dervishes' view that can only be condemned by religion, because theology is a mental representation of something that cannot be represented by the mind. The dervish is always saying, "Why do you look for God up there? He is here." That's a totally different way of looking at things. Why do you think God is other than yourself? He is you. Of course if you say, "I am God," you'd end up in an asylum.
 Know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God. 
 Ibn' Arabi 
As soon as you try to reach beyond the usual way of thinking you get into paradoxes. That's why the sayings of the Sufis are so incongruous for simple- minded people. That's why Sufism is so little known, because it's so challenging.

What does that mean? I hardly dare say it because I could be burned at the stake for saying this. Can you think of God as a virtuality that becomes a reality in existence? The software of the universe becomes reality; like the software of the computer that becomes reality in the hardware. Can you see that? That's a very revolutionary view which corresponds absolutely with modern views of physics. For example, the pathway of an airplane is not like the highway for a car which is already set; the airplane discovers its path and constructs its path as it moves. God is auto-structuring Himself in the forms of the world but existing as a potentiality. It's not existing as much as God is and becomes existent in the universe as a potentiality. It means all possibility as a level one reaches in one's meditation when one somehow reaches beyond the limitation of one's mind. One can't say one grasps; only that one espies the level of all possibility and sees that whatever occurs in the universe represents only a very small fraction of all possibilities that are virtual.  

A saying of Pir-o-Murshid that is absolutely central and which corresponds with the ancient view of the Sufis, particularly Ibn' Arabi:
Make God a reality. 
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Instead of saying, "I want to know God," say, "I want to make God a reality." How can you make God a reality? As you; the accent is on you. I refer to words of Ibn 'Arabi that are based upon the Qur'an: 
There is nothing on earth that does not have its tenuities with us.  
 Our response to the Divine action in us causes the Divine Archetypes to descend into forms.  
 Ibn' Arabi
The mind and the body participate in the realization we are looking for by extending beyond their limits. 


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The Practice of Dhikr

Dhikr is a process of self discovery. God is continually revealing Him/Herself by the divisive forms that are only signals, but which lead one into grasping this reality that is constantly projecting itself as form. Consider Dhikr as a prayer. It is really creating a temple in which we can discover God as the sacred quintessence of our being. 

The motion of the Dhikr, the movements of the head, are just indications of the different settings of one's consciousness and realization. First one turns towards the outside and the consciousness expands; that's called Nazut. Then one  turns within and one begins to see outside from the inside; that's called Arwah, a state that will favor creativity. In the third stage, Mithal, the world of metaphor, thoughts are projected as forms and reveal our being to us, so God reveals His being to us the way it manifests to us. This is because our personality is also made of clues. Then finally one reaches upwards as one calls it, or shifts one's sense of identity into discovering the celestial or Malakut levels of one's being. What one means by shifting one's identity is down-playing one's previous self-image and replacing it with a celestial one. 

 La Illaha 

Start making a circle as you exhale and say La as you slowly move your head in a circular fashion. Your head faces your left shoulder and if you are sitting cross-legged, it faces your left knee then your right knee, your right shoulder and finally right up towards zenith. At first it seems like a circle, but you could think of it as a spiral. You'll notice that just moving the body has the effect of expanding your consciousness into the galaxies as Jelaluddin Rumi said. Somehow you are reestablishing your connection with the totality, not just the cosmos, but the total universe.

If you look at it more deeply, you'll find that the circle is a heart; you start the Dhikr at the heart center and then you move up and down, then up again. It's like the right lobe of the heart, La Illaha. The reason for Illaha, which you say after La as you move your head towards your right shoulder, is that La Illaha represents higher levels than the physical universe. La, the physical Universe, Illaha, celestial spheres, higher spheres. So Illaha comes right at the end of the right loop of the heart, the end of the upward motion towards the zenith.

We described layers of our being, the peripheral layers and the inner (Page 41) layers. When you are expanding you get into the outer layers where there is overlap with the environment, and that extends right into the whole universe. You lose a sense of yourself as a discrete entity just like a vortex, a whirlpool in the water that doesn't have boundaries. Now you've lost a sense of your boundaries and your consciousness becomes expanded and all-encompassing.  

Notice that at the moment when your head is turned towards the zenith, it is in a state of unstable equilibrium. Imagine you had a pail of water and you were swinging it around in circles. If you keep on moving the water won't drop out, even if the pail is upside down, but if there is a moment of hesitation it will. So you realize that by moving in a circle you are generating centrifugal forces and then you're generating centripetal forces. The centrifugal forces are expanding your consciousness right out in infinite regress into the Universe. You lose your sense of your personal identity. 

 Illa 

Now if you just let your head follow that impulse, you can feel the pull of the void as your head reaches down toward the solar plexus. You're reaching into what is the moon in the Sufi symbol, but you can still see it's like a heart. As the head comes down, at first you realize the whole universe gets processed in your being like the water in a lake is processed in the vortex. Think of your solar plexus as a gate into the vacuum because you know the center of the centrifuge is a vacuum. You are breaking out of the circle because you are responding to the pull of the center.

Now you get right down into your solar plexus, Illa, so that your being is recycled. It is resorbed in the void and then recycled again in a new birthing, Illa. 

Remember we started by looking at our problems and seeing how we were interfacing with circumstances around us and adapting ourselves to the environment. We were trying to find some means of protecting ourselves or coping with the assault of the environment upon us, upon our vulnerable being inside. We turned within because we found that if we were just concerned with the environment, we were identifying with the peripheral areas of our being and were not really in touch with our deeper self. If you give vent to the centripetal forces instead of the centrifugal ones, you attempt to highlight your inner being. That is called turning within. Then we suddenly discover who we are and our countenance behind our mask. You see that which transpires behind that which appears. There is a sentence in the Sura of the Qur'an:
Everywhere is the face of God. 
 (Page 42) 
Now shift your sense of identity, and say it's your body that you identify with your body. You identify with your subtle body, etheric body, electromagnetic field, light field, and so on. See if you can feel it around your arms, your forearms, your shoulders. It's also in front of your heart. You feel like a magnet; it's the energy field. Think of your body as a formation within that field, so the field is like a template in which your body is being formed. Now really identify with that field, that subtle body or latif, and see how it affects you as you are doing that motion. Your magnetic field is whirling like a story of Jelaluddin Rumi. You are building up a tremendous amount of energy.

Notice that when your head descends and turns towards the solar plexus it tends to rebound again. Now we are proceeding in a totally different dimension that you could call transcendent instead of cosmic. You see, the sense of expansion gives you a sense of the cosmic dimension of your being, like your holistic interrelationship with the environment. But when your head turns upwards then you have a feeling of being elevated. Maybe it's just a feeling, but you're creating conditions that are favorable to discovering levels of your being which one could call celestial. These are not subject to the same time relationship, to the same mortality, as our physical body. 

 'Llah 

Perhaps the most important moment in the practice of the Dhikr is after having said La Illaha Illa, you say 'Llah. During that gap you are in the abyss; you don't know what is happening. There is a voidness in your thinking because you are in a state of expectancy, awaiting. That's the moment when some of the elements of the subconscious that are subliminal are beginning to break through the threshold into creative thoughts. A new dispensation arises in you. It's based upon a saying in the Qur'an:
One is recurrently reborn.

That cuts the causality of the past and the prefiguration of the future. However, creativity happens when one does not limit oneself by the past, by causality, but feels the call of the future. That is prefiguration. Imagine how you could be. It's the action of the future upon the present, although the future is not yet there, it's the possibility or the probability of the future. That's called retrocausality, the opposite of casuality, the action of the future upon the present instead of the action of the past on the present. There is no doubt that the action is still there. The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past.

You invite this transcendental element in your formative process, 'Llah. That rebirthing would just be a recycling if you stopped at Illa. You don't say the first a but it's a very difficult thing to do, Illa 'Llah. 
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You have been inhaling as your head comes down, and you continue inhaling as the head goes up on 'Llah. At this stage, when you say, Illa, there is at first the a, it is the void and the 'Llah is that which is beginning to surface out of the void; that's self organizing itself. It gives you a sense of drawing something out of the void, and it's followed by the two l's, 'Llah. It's the breakthrough that enables you to mutate, to bring in another factor than just the continual repetition, and occurs when you say the La Illaha Illa 'Llah. 

At the first a before 'Llah, think, "I see myself. I see God becoming in me as I am becoming." God is discovering Him/Herself through you. This moment is when you are beginning to give vent to the divine point of view instead of your point of view, or rather the interconnection between the two. That discovery will put you on the track of what you can become; otherwise you would continue to be what you are. It's a kind of vision; you could even project it as an image. For example, all of a sudden a flash of your face could be reflecting your celestial nature plus all the wisdom you've gained from the earth. It's the realm of  creative imagination. You have this vision that you discover the way God discovers Him/Herself through what you're becoming. When you say, 'Llah, then you are discovering yourself through the discovery that God has of Him/Herself through you at a further stage. You have two l's. Your head is turned upwards from having turned to the solar plexus. 

Normally if you were to simply give vent to the new dispensation emerging from within, you would transfer your attention from your solar plexus to your heart center. Radiate out from your heart center because the heart center is expansive and the solar plexus is turned within, inverted. You would reach outside from inside. 

 Hu 

The "H" represents the transcendental aspect of our being as one holds one's breath. As the head rebounds upwards, the quintessence of one's being is being extracted from the dross. This is a typical alchemical process; distillation. The consequence is that one begins to identify with the immortal condition of one's being, although it is not unchanging; we always associate mortality with change. 

This is a sense like the perfume is in the process of being extracted; it's not unchanging but the flower is eternized as a perfume. That's the sense that you have of suddenly discovering your immortality. Somehow one can survive one's transiency, a kind of victory over death. You find yourself free and awakened, yet it's a moment of suspense, as in samadhi. 
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Now, if you say Hu, the head turns back toward the heart center, so the 'H' is very short, because our objective is not samadhi; it is samadhi with open eyes. That's what the Dhikr is about, to make God present, and that's the meaning of Hu. You awaken in life, instead of waking beyond life.

 Summary 

If you can think of those different stages, saying the words, eventually you associate the words with the experience. Think the words without saying them aloud, but just make the motion upon the breath. As you're doing the circle you would be saying La Illaha, you exhale. Centrifugal. Now you reverse things. You inhale as you turn within, inhale Illa. Your head is coming down; you can think of an arrow hitting your solar plexus. One continues to inhale as the head comes up, 'Llah, so you're gradually moving upwards from the solar plexus to Hu, divine presence. 

In the Dhikr, one is carried beyond one's personal vantage point by subsuming a vantage point which one can never totally encompass, but which does free one from the limitation of one's own standpoint. 

You have La Illaha Illa 'Llah Hu: There is no God but God. You have the two; the negative and the positive aspect. A point of the Sufis is that this whole universe is the being of God.
He is both the seer and that through which He sees.
Ibn 'Arabi
 (Page 45) 
A-L-L-A-H

The first "A" of Allah represents Mithal, where you are rebirthing yourself by recycling the matrix of your being. The first "L" represents Malakut, which is the celestial sphere, and the second "L", Jabarut, which represents the intelligence rather than consciousness. It is the mode of thinking that does not rest upon experience, and which is compelling; so it is much stronger than the knowledge you gain from experience. That means that you have to shift your identity. 

In the first "L", reminisce upon your angelic state, and extract your being from the dross. In alchemy, by distillation one extracts the essence of the materia prima, the first substance that is used for the operation. The essence is extracted as vapor in the retort, and then it is condensed again as water. That's the same thing that we're doing here. You have to have a sense of not just leaving the earth behind, but transmuting in yourself all that was borrowed from the earth, because of following your bliss, your aspiration towards divine splendor, beyond beauty. That is the definition of the celestial sphere, splendor beyond beauty.

Now, the second "L", Jabarut, is where you think of the words of Ibn 'Arabi:  
Knowledge is a veil upon the known.

You pass through a dark night of the mind, of the understanding, like St. John of the Cross did, where all your mental constructs pale. They seem to be absolutely useless in comparison with the kind of knowledge being revealed to you which you can't acquire. It's so exciting that one has a sense of awakening; one is down-playing one's perspective and opening another. 
You thought you were the witness but the real witness is the witness in the heavens.
Suhrawardhi 
Ibn 'Arabi says, "No more imagination."  So you don't project upon God any kind of imagination as you imagine God to be; form. No more creative imagination. No more mental constructs; that's the dark night of the understanding. You are doing it with your crutches.

The next 'A' of the word Allah represents Lahut, which is the plane of archetypes, the archetypal level. Think in terms of archetypes instead  of exemplars. For example, a very peaceful person comes into the room and somebody (Page 46) might say, "It's wonderful to see a peaceful person." The dervish would say, "Isn't it wonderful to see divine peace coming through this person."  That's the difference. You're seeing qualities in their exemplars, you're not just seeing their exemplars. That's a level of consciousness called Lahut.

When we talk about our divine inheritance we mean the features of our personality are the exemplars of those archetypes. In the practice of the Wazaif, one is connecting the exemplar in one to the attribute of its perfection one ascribes to God. Between these two there are tenuities, very fine threads. They're very fragile. There are some connections between the archetype level, which is called the super-celestial, and the Nazut level; the existential level. There are correspondences and the Qur'an states there is nothing on earth that does not have its correspondence with us. That means it's at that archetypal level.  
These tenuities are ladders built by the Angels.
 Ibn 'Arabi
Just think that you have a ladder that enables you to reach upwards from where you ascribe your qualities to yourself. You think, " This is me, this is my attribute." The ladder helps you to realize these are really absolutely cosmic and I am exemplifying them in my being. I am the exemplar, not a reality per se, but only a derived reality.

Then one establishes a relationship between these two levels and it's interpreted as a covenant, like the covenant of the knight, between God and man. That's very important in Islam. In Sufism the covenant is initiation in the Sufi Order by renewing the pledge that one made in pre-eternity to affirm and serve the divine sovereignty. Every time you say a Wazifa you declare your wish to serve that divine quality of God by actuating it in your being. You establish a connection, and that's not God; that's God as the Lord, not the ultimate Being of God, but it's a very high level.

Now, for those who are interested in the Islamic transmissions, there's a story in the Qur'an that Mohammed made a journey from the mosque in Medina to the Mosque in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock. In his vision he found himself at a distance of two throws of an arrow, what is called the lotus of the limit which is the throne. That's measured by the distance found between the chord of a bow and the way you hold your hand when you pull the arrow. You are pulling on that chord with the arrow in your hand, and so the distance between that chord and the bow would be the measured distance. It means very close. 

So those two "L's" are the two throws of the arrow; the connection between the first "A" of Allah and the second. The first "A," Mithal, is where you are rebirthing yourself by recycling the samsaric matrix of your being, and then (Page 47) Lahut, the transpersonal level of archetypes. There are tenuities between the two. 

It's not good enough to recycle through your creativity in the unconscious  to unfurl the potentialities of your being. To rebirth yourself you have to recontact the archetypal level. Rediscover your divine inheritance. You are born out of those two parents: Mother and Father; the Divine Father and the Earthly Mother.

Now there's an "H" at the end of Allah. If you know something about Arabic you know it is very remarkable, because"A" is the arrow, and "L" is the bow, and so you go from the "A" to the "L" and the"L" to the "A" -Allah, Illa 'Llah, always the"L"' and two "L's", and the"A"; or the "A" becomes an "I", but the "H" is something totally different. It represents a transcendental dimension called Hahut. That's the kind of thing you experience in samadhi; it is beyond existence. To use the words of Buddha, "Beyond existence and nonexistence." So, in the Dhikr you do have just a flash of samadhi at the end of the ascent of your head. La Illaha Illa 'Llah, and the "H" at the end of Allah, but it's just a moment of suspense, and then it's followed by Hu. The "U" is appended to the"H", turn your head towards your heart center. Al Hallaj says:
 When several people in a room are thinking about a being who's not in the room, it makes that person more present in the room than the people in the room. 

Let's do a breathing practice called shaghal. Turn your eyeballs upwards and place your index fingers on your eyelids in such a way that you don't press the retina through the cornea. If your eyes were in their normal position you would be pressing upon your eyes and you would have optical illusions. Place your fourth and fifth fingers on your lips and your middle fingers in the proximity of your nostrils, but do not press your nostrils yet. Exhale through both nostrils, inhale through both nostrils, and then press your left middle finger and inhale through the right nostril. Hold your breath, and exhale. When you exhale, your eyes get back into the normal position. Do this three times, three breaths only, inhaling and exhaling through the right nostril, not through the left. After three breaths take your fingers away but keep your eyes closed, and put your thumbs in your ears.

That is a practice that favors turning within. Notice you're not at the call of the impressions from outside because you have placed, not sentinels, but real barriers at the doors of the senses. If you place barriers to your access to the environment, consciousness turns within. But then your consciousness is not focused any more. It becomes intermeshed with the consciousness of the whole universe. There's an overwhelming emotion that one doesn't know how to interpret.
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Concentrate on the solar plexus. You get into that void, and as you exhale something new comes out of that void. If you turn your eyeballs upwards and curl your tongue so you press the bottom of your tongue against your palate, it will have a very different effect. Now you are inviting the higher levels of your being to associate with the new elements that are emerging through your solar plexus. It's like a marriage of those two parents, and your being ensues out of that marriage, the juxtaposition of those two. 
Wisdom is born out of the mixture of the wisdom of the heavens and the wisdom of the earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan   
The two planes, Malakut and Jabarut, represent the angelic sphere and the thinking beyond the level of existence. It's like the other side of the curtain. This way of thinking, that does not rest upon experience, will give you access to the plane of all possibilities, called the plane of archetypes, Lahut. Everything that happens on earth is derived from this level of reality. The universe is an exemplification of this archetypal level and your thinking  can now shift. Always think in terms of this transcendental level.

You just have to make one more leap and it's as though you have freed yourself from the existential condition totally,  and had access into the divine mind, or the divine strategy. Hold your breath, with your eyeballs upwards, and think of the letter "H." You'll find the same in the Jewish language, actually there's ultimately the name of God in Hebrew, just "H." It's a state of suspense; that's why you hold your breath. 

I think one can only awaken in life after having awakened beyond life. You can see things that are happening to you. The meaningfulness of what is enacted in the world is being revealed to you because you are seeing it from the divine point of view. It's very different from the human vantage point.

 You're transmuting things from your personal self into a transpersonal dimension. It's when you say Allah, you always feel the impact of the Lahut level; of the last "H" of Allah, so that is the pull of the future. 


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The Knowledge of the Heart

One has given up judging things from one's mind, but basing one's assessment based upon emotional attunement instead of understanding. Can you see that?  Instead of passing judgment on a person, saying, "I don't like this, that, or the other thing," your assessment of that person is simply due to your attunement.  Perhaps you feel that person is drawing you down into the dumps or you feel that person inspires you. It's what the Sufis call the knowledge of the heart. It is the kind of knowledge that is going to lift you into the higher spheres;  it is ecstasy.

That is precisely what the churches are trying to convey. I don't mean just the Christian churches, but any religion: Islam, Hinduism, and so on; even Buddhism is trying to enact on earth conditions that are reminiscent of heavenly conditions: music, beauty, the beautiful architecture. They are looking towards something that somehow reflects that celestial state and would have the effect of enlisting the high emotions in people.  

Perhaps you can recognize in yourself the whole gamut of emotions: some that are degrading and some that are uplifting. If you look into Buddhism you find that Buddha differentiates very clearly the kind of emotions that are gross and emotions that are fine. Look around you. If you watch TV, you find you are subjected a lot of very gross emotions. 

Cultivate situations that arouse beautiful emotions in your meditation, like listening to music for example, or thinking  beautiful thoughts that will elevate your soul, so that if you are very concerned about your problems you can't look down on them. Simply think that your ordinary assessment of your problems is not reliable and that you are missing out on a way of looking at them which will not be demeaning and compelling; you find a kind of measure of freedom in yourself. That's what Pir-o-Murshid means by "working through the ties."  

I'll tell you the story of the Gordian knot. In a village in Greece there was a knot which was so inextricable that somebody said if anybody is able to unravel this knot they will conquer the world. Alexander the First went there and he got impatient trying to untie the Gordian knot; he cut it with his sword and therefore he never conquered the world. That's the story. We tend to think the way to reach into the heavenly state is to cut our relationship with the world like monks or nuns. We think in terms of relationships, like for example this relationship is (Page 50) standing in the way of my attaining illumination, until you realize you don't solve the problem by cutting your relationship. The story of the Gordian knot is that you unravel the ties that get very entangled so you can look into them and see how they got entangled. It's a way of looking at things from the top instead of the same level. 
  The witness in you is your heavenly counterpart. You are the heavenly witness.
Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi  
So imagine how the angel looks at conditions on the earth rather than how humans do, the birds-eye view instead of the worms-eye view. In order to do so you have to identify with the idealistic celestial inspired being you are in your soul, and then look at your addiction, let's say to the earth, and you see what it does to your soul. See how you can still remain involved without being addicted, because addiction is a conditioning, and we want to be free. The freedom is the freedom from conditioning. For example, instead of depending upon somebody's love, you love them even if they don't love you and what is more, the great art of loving is of course to love obnoxious people. It's very difficult. That's where we are tested in our love. It's easy to love a nice person. 

 Our experience is distorted by our interpretation of it and that's why we have to not just work with experience but see what meaning it has for us. One is challenging one's ordinary way of thinking, and consequently that's what's happening in your meditation. You are questioning all the time your ordinary way of thinking. You're caught in the circle.  

I can understand that it arouses a lot of questions. One gets caught up in one's mind and it becomes like a debate: who's right and who's wrong. For example, a rishi was trying to get into the thinking of this man who was asking him questions and he couldn't ever satisfy the mind of this man because his way of thinking was so different. I'm not saying that my thinking is different. I'm just saying that I think opinion is relative. As Buddha says: 
Free yourself from opinion. 

Now observe your breath and it will slow down. Reflect on many of the things we have covered, for example, the way we are drawn into the reverie of our being by providing a defense system and losing sight of who we are; the way  we turn within and transfer the way we see the world into our psyche, which is mis-assessed, and consequently we can't discover who we are if we simply transfer our assessment of the world situation inside ourselves. Therefore, we need to unmask the hoax.
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The mantra here would be, "What If my assessment is wrong? What if it is so-and-so rather than what I think it is?" That's freedom from opinion and therefore you gain a measure of freedom. 

Proceed further in the depth of your being and place sentinels at the doors of perception. If you are able to dissolve those false assumptions and the notion of yourself called the false self, then you discover your being in the process of becoming, of unfurling. You realize you have to let the outer petals of that flower that you are fall apart rather than hang on to them.  

As you meditate and turn within, you find images will be projected on the screen of your mind and that's the way in which reality that does not have a form is being revealed to you; through forms.
 Amongst these forms you will discover your own form; your true countenance. 
Ibn' Arabi
If you remember, we had to be fully creative. It wasn't good enough to just project what we are becoming, but we had to include all levels of our being. Consequently, there is a sense of down-playing our earthly condition and giving vent to our aspirations and ideals. Discover the child in us that is beautiful, untarnished, and lies at the core of our being, and can be awakened to prevail upon all those extraneous aspects of our being that have tagged on. We really are discovering; it seems much more true, that this is our real being rather than the one we think we discovered when we removed our mask.  

The consequence is a real breakthrough of joy; overwhelmingly so. It's like you were going to dance with joy, a sense of having awakened, and a sense that the universe is awakening itself through you and as you as you free ourselves from our false identity.

For those two poles of our being to be able to interact and promote awakening there needs to be a sense of our interfacing with God as we imagine Him/Her to be. That's not what He/She is, but still that very effort of interfacing or standing before God, even if it's an imaginary projection, will enhance and awaken the more noble aspects of our being that we project upon God. They are awakened and that means talking about God created through one's prayers, creating a situation whereby God can create himself as us. That is the meaning of the sacred, and that is what we miss the most in our life.

I'd like to introduce the story of Joan of Arc and her victory; one of the most amazing stories one could ever imagine. As a young girl of 13 she used to listen to the church bells and she interpreted them as voices. She was a very (Page 52) mystical being. At the age of 15 she had the impression that she was sent on a mission to restore the king of France to his throne. The British had besieged many of the cities of France, and the Dauphin was rather a weak character. Here was this amazing young girl who followed her voice, and dressed in men's clothes. Somehow by her conviction she convinced the governor of a city to let her go and visit the Dauphin who was living in a castle. That whole area was under the governance of the British. It's a long adventure. She was able not only to have an audience with the Dauphin, but also to convince him to follow her. By that time she had collected an army of volunteers who were very deeply moved by what she represented, the power that was coming through her. They rode their horses and conquered most of the British forces. Finally they took Orleans, which was a very strong garrison. It was a great feat.  

There was a magical legend about this extraordinary woman. She was then 17. She was a very frail, rather illiterate peasant girl who just had the strength of this conviction of her voices. Nowadays if somebody hears voices, you close them up in an asylum. That's the paradox of this story. After they conquered Orleans, they went to the cathedral of Rheims where the kings of France were crowned. The Dauphin was under the protection of this little maid of 17, was crowned king. Then on her way to Rouen she was captured, dragged off her horse, tortured and thrown into jail in chains. 

She faced a trial with all the learned men of the church and also the powers that be. It was an inquisition by the church fathers. Of course she proclaimed her innocence. She was tortured and then dragged out of the cell to sign an apparition, which means to recognize that the voices were just illusion, hallucination. The whole idea was to discredit that myth about her. Weak and distraught and broken, she signed the apparitus. A few days later she relapsed, because she realized her voices were true. She was excommunicated, subjected again to torture, and then burnt alive at the stake. 

There you see the brutality of the powers that be, the ego power of the people condemning her, and the fanaticism of the theologians in their lack of understanding. She didn't know how to argue. She couldn't protect herself. So at one point maybe she thought, "Well after all who am I? These people, they are learned people and who am I? I can't even read or write." It was only for two days I think. After that she had these terrible thoughts, "How could I be untrue to my voices?" That's when she relapsed. She was eventually burnt on the stake because there was a custom that witches should be burnt at the stake and they considered her to be a witch who had magical powers. I said she was excommunicated from the church. A few centuries afterwards the Church itself relapsed. So this little girl made that Catholic Church relapse and come back on its decision of condemning her.  
 (Page 53) 
Behind that there is something which perhaps we understand in our time, and that is the feminine, that strange kind of power of the feminine which men don't always understand. I think again of my sister who was so vulnerable. The cruelty of it is just unbearable, unbelievable.  

Do you recognize something of the Nazis? That is the kind of thing my sister Noor experienced. This is very significant to me because my sister volunteered when she heard about the tortures inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis. She volunteered to land in France with a radio in order to maintain contact between the war office and the underground forces of the resistance. It was her messages that were decisive in the victory of the allies against the Nazis. She had a chance of leaving, but she refused because she felt she had to do this. She knew the danger. 

Noor had accomplished what she needed to do and a plane landed to fetch her. She went to her apartment to fetch her last things and particularly her code. The Nazis were there to capture her. I was at the trial afterwards. We heard that the Nazi who arrested her said he had received a telephone call from a French woman who said she had the address of my sister and wanted to sell it for 100,000 francs. The Nazi met her on a bench and the transaction was made. The consequence of this betrayal was that the very brother of this woman and hundreds of other people were arrested and tortured. I saw that woman at the trial. She was acquitted by the judge because the lawyer said, "Well we've suffered enough through the Nazis and now it is a Nazi who is the only witness here against our French people."  

She was thrown in a lorry and taken in chains to the concentration camp in Dachau. She made an attempt at escaping and was placed in chains in a cell for nine months. My sister was the most vulnerable child,the most  beautiful person, an idealist. Then she got news that she was condemned to death, and the guard kept on kicking her. There were enormous hematomas all over her body. She was exposed in agony throughout the night, practically naked on the cement floor without shelter. The next day she was whipped and boxed, hit to the point that she was, as a witness said, a bloody mess. Then she was made to kneel and was shot behind her head. She didn't cry. Her last words were, "Vive la liberte." Apparently there was still some motion in her body when she was thrown into the oven, and that oven is still there in Dachau.   

I met a man who was twice in a concentration camp, once in Russia, and once in Germany during the second World War. He told me he felt so sorry for the man who was torturing him. He said all he had to do was get into the consciousness of Christ and think of those words, "Forgive them, for they don't know what they do." He said, "That man didn't know he was reacting, giving vent to his (Page 54) anger. He was brainwashed and probably had a lot of resentment in his life and was getting it out on me; and now I would have resentment against him and it would be a whole chain reaction." He saw that  both times. This is an extraordinary feat. 

Emotionally, you can be in love with life. You can be so shattered by the meaningfulness of life by involving yourself in the drama, and what is connected behind it. When Christ said, "Blessed are the poor in spirit," that is wrongly translated. What he said is, "Be of good cheer, you who are broken in life." It is quite a different thing. Be of good cheer! When you see that, what seems to be a defeat can aver itself to be a victory, and that is what he is saying. The marvel of life is so gripping, it shatters you in your emotions. Let's call that enthusiasm, but it is a form of love.

There's a way of reconciling the irreconcilables. Honor your sadness and at the same time be happy. You don't have to overcome your sadness to be happy; you can be both at the same time. I have a vision of a dervish who is dancing on thorns with a crown of thorns on his head and is in a state of ecstasy, full of joy. It occurred to me that Christ was in a state of supreme joy on the cross, which could not ever have been attained if things had been hunky-dory.  There's a saying of a Muslim, Al Hazali, about Al Hallaj, a Sufi who was crucified: 
Whenever there is a stupid judge in the judgment seat there's a victim on the cross. 

The crucification of Christ was a coronation. It's a different way of looking at life and if you see life like that, all of a sudden there's a kind of breathless state. You are free from the limitation of your understanding. That means you are shattered in your understanding, and that's a moment of ecstasy.  


 (Page 55) 
The Path of Light

The path we have chosen is the path of light. If you belong to those who are overwhelmed by the appearance of light whatever the origin, you've knocked at the right door. It's a commitment that the Zoroastrian Magi used to make: to fight for the victory of light over darkness. It has a lot of different meanings, one is, "Let there be light." 

 Ultimately light is the emergence of truth that has been hidden by a cover-up of manipulation and dishonesty in life. It's of very deep significance for our soul. I hope you're amongst those who are delighted when you see somebody who brings a lot of light with them. There are also people who bring the dark clouds with them. You'll notice that those who bring a lot of light are selfless and giving. Those who have a dark cloud are selfish and depressed, but tyrannical at the same time. There is some kind of a maladjustment in their being. The cure is to bring to light everything that has been covered up and kept in the dark, whatever the cost.  

All of a sudden something happens to one. Perhaps sometimes you have the feeling as though you are absolutely flooded in life and radiance. Our objective is to obtain illumination, but one can never attain it. It's an ongoing process. That's the concept that goes together with awakening, because you have something much more tangible here. Awakening is all of a sudden shifting into another perspective, but illumination is first one's aura, then one's glance, then one's intelligence avails itself to be luminous. It's something one needs to work with every day and it will transform your being. 

Originally you know the physical universe was simply a big breakthrough of light. The Big Bang was just an explosion of light. There's been some crystallization of what we call light into the form of matter; although according to physicists light is matter. It's the electrons rather than photons, or particles rather than waves. The extraordinary thing is that this light-like aspect of matter, is somehow subsumed in matter and can at any time erupt, like in a radioactive substance. The same is true of ourselves. If you think that way, you realize you don't have to forget your bodiness in order to become luminous. It's rather the other way around; there is a lot of luminescence in the body because you know the cells of the body are able to absorb light from the environment.
 
The electrons begin to dance; they begin to free themselves from the pristine constraint. Something happens to the body by simply absorbing light. The more you concentrate on absorbing light, the more light you can absorb. There is (Page 56) a mind over body effect here, and that's what meditation is about. 

The electrons and the atoms begin to literally dance a dance of freedom. Consequently the cells are energized, nourished by light, and they begin to divide. That's the reason why there are ways of using light for healing. The cells also emit light; they don't simply reflect the light they absorb, they go through a process. It's a sacrifice because the electrons have to get back into their original place again, and whatever energy remains is radiated out. There is some sacrifice even in the cells of the body in order to radiate light. Sacrifice seems to be written right into the program of the world; but it's a joy. 

 Light of the Body 

Now simply be aware of a lot of light in your eyes. It's because nerve cells  are much more sensitive to light. The retina is particularly more sensitive than our skin. It absorbs light that gets threaded into the brain cells. Then that light is emitted through the optic nerves, into the retina, through the cornea and into the environment. Just think of that as you inhale and draw a lot of light from whatever it could be, the sun, the electricity, a candle. 

Think that the light is threaded right into your brain, so the brain builds up a tremendous amount of light. That's why one pictures a crown as a corona, in an area above the skull. High frequency light in the brain is able to pass through the skull and through form; that is particularly true when people are inspired. The light that is built up in the brain is more in the nature of ultraviolet and colorless. That light adumbrates one's whole being and can pass through the optic nerves and into outer space, traveling through space at a speed of 186,000 miles a second. 

 As you inhale you are drawing in light through your eyes. When you exhale you are radiating light through your eyes. Eventually you exercise yourself to imagine that you're looking into a very bright light. This is a practice that yogis and dervishes do and I myself have done them at the top of the hill in Ajmer where Moinuddin Chisti used to do the same practice. It is looking at the sun at dawn without blinking one's eyelids and trying to hold out as long as you can. You do a little bit more every day. Some of these rishis and dervishes are able to do this for hours and hours. 

Normally your retina would be burned in a few seconds, or even a split second if you were exposed to a blinding light of the sun without a shield. There's a technique. One uses one's hands as a shield to protect the eyes a little bit until they get strong enough to be able to face the sun. That's a very extraordinary feeling of an interface with a very powerful light. The secret of it is to be able to do exactly a practice that is concentrating on the light of your glance. The (Page 57) light of the sun is not perceived as such; you are casting your light upon the sun. Of course the light of the sun is stronger than yours just as, for example the light of the stars is stronger than that of the sun. But still, somehow you're blinded from seeing the stars because of the sun. 
Those who produce light have eyes like the sun. 
Platinus
 Think of your eyes like the sun, emitting a lot of light. The power of one's glance is stronger than the power of the sun, as it reaches one. It could never compare with it and that's the secret. That's how they're able to do it. Imagine your eyes to be like the headlamps of a car. You're looking into a bright light like a search light. There is a confrontation of two lights that has a mirroring effect, so that by its interfacing with the search light, the light of your glance is enhanced. Now, think of the starry skies. It's really an ocean of light that gets converged in points, pinpointed in the stars, and that's what we see. The whole firmament is a tremendous array of light. 

A crystal has extraordinary faculties of fluorescing, first by absorbing light from the environment and then emitting it. In the same way your body is like a crystal or crystallized light, and has that faculty of processing light, not just the environment but the whole cosmos. That means as you inhale you absorb it, and as you exhale, you radiate it out. Imagine that your heart is the center of your aura, just like the sun. 

Now hold your breath between inhaling and exhaling. Imagine there are parallel universes and we are only aware of a chunk of the universe, a layer, because the parallel universes all intermesh, intertwine. When a new star is born, it's as though a luminous reality that was virtual in the subliminal universe emerged in this universe. The same thing happens to you. You can cal lit  a new dispensation of light that is not due to your absorbing light from the environment, but which emerges from within. When one holds one's breath, one creates a situation that favors the emergence of new life. 

Now when you exhale and radiate light, you are not just boomeranging back the light that you've absorbed from the stars. On the one hand it's the way you retransmit the light that you absorbed, and the other thing is the new dispensation of light. Two things have composed; light has originated in two different ways that merge as you exhale.  

These were the first steps because all the while we were identifying with our body. We absorb light, then we it is the body that absorbed light, when a new light emerges coming from within the body.
 (Page 58) 
 Light of the Aura 

 Now we're going to identify with our aura. Think of it as a template in which your body is being formed. If you see it that way, your aura is the light of the stars or the light of the cosmos that has been converged and expands. It is like a vortex so it does not have a boundary. When one says it converges, one means there is intensification towards the center axis, just like the vortex of a whirlpool in the water. All the water of the lake gets pulled into the whirlpool, and gets dispersed into the whole pool of water. If you do that, you get a sense of deja vu:
"I have always been a being of light and it was that light pattern that fashioned my body in the womb." Or, "The cells of my body had to conform to the genes of my parents, and yet I'm not just a product of those genes. There is something different in me because I always was a being of light. Maybe what I am has been buried somehow. All I need to do is call it by being aware of it, by earmarking it, and it will awaken." 

 Now the body seems to be a formation that undergoes change continually while one's aura has a kind of stability, like the matrix in which the transient, ephemeral body is continually being shaped. One says, "I'm a being of light." At first one identifies oneself with one's aura, and of course one doesn't know what one means. It doesn't mean the aura of physical light; it is evolving. It's continually being converged and dispersed, a continuity in change. 

The real breakthrough is when you're able to grasp that it would be a limitation to reduce light to its physical expression. That evidences the limitation in our finite minds to grasp reality beyond what we perceive. If you're free from that compunction of having to think of light as physical, that is where you discover the celestial spheres, nonphysical light. Of course you don't have a profile. Your physical aura doesn't have a profile. Still,  the shape of the aura does espouse the physical contours of the body to some extent. At this level you're absolutely at the threshold between form and no form. It is of the nature of the expression of your face rather than your face, something that transpires through that which appears.  

Once more now, let's try to be aware of both one's celestial counterpart and one's physical aura. There's some interaction between the two, the way your aura reflects the nature of your celestial being. On the other hand, it is exposed to the shadows of the world, and consequently there is some distortion and it cannot render adequately the nature of your celestial being. It is hidden within the physical aura, but if you're conscious of it, it shapes your physical aura and transforms it.  

Just concentrate again on your glance. Think of physical light as I described it. Can you imagine that these beams of light are unfiltered by nonphysical light that passes through your glance if you identify yourself with your celestial (Page 59) being? That kind of light begins to come through your physical glance. Now there is a secret here. You know there is a point in the skull where the three sections of the skull coincide, called the fontanel. Tibetans place a straw in that aperture and break through the skin to reach the brain, so there is an opening, a communication between the brain and the atmosphere. That's a rather drastic method. I wouldn't recommend it to you, but still think of this aperture. Since the skull does prevent most of the light from the environment from seeping into the brain, the eyes are generally the way in which this can happen. Only the ultraviolet comes through.  

We have another aperture which affects a different part of the brain than what is reached through the optic nerve. It is in the cortical area, and is particularly sensitive to ultraviolet light. A third inlet is the atlas at the base of the crown of the skull, at the juncture between the skull and the vertebra. You can feel it in your neck at the back. 

There's a practice to open up that center. As you exhale you concentrate on the celestial light emitted by your glance. Inhale and sense that you are drawing, not the physical light but that celestial light into your brain from on top. In terms of physics, this is probably nonsensical, but I can only say that it works. Think that this descending light upon you is cast forward, refracted through your optic nerves, your retina, and eventually your glance that is reaching out into the starry sky. Instead of concentrating on the two eyes, you now concentrate on the third eye, the pineal gland. It's very sensitive to ultraviolet light and therefore cosmic rays, and so it responds to the monitoring of the center of the galaxy instead of the sun, and determines our circadian rhythm.  

Instead of simply concentrating on the glance of your two eyes, imagine there's a third beam. It's difficult because it is threaded through one's glance. It is as though your glance becomes like an x-ray instead of just casting light forward. I know a yogi who was working with this and he challenged anyone to test him. He was blindfolded in a dark room and he could read the book they placed  in front of him. We're not talking about the body. The pineal gland simply acts as a transducer, but this only happens if you really identify yourself with your celestial counterpart. 
 The witness, the commonplace witness that you thought you were is replaced now by the witness in the heavens, the celestial witness.  
Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi  (Page 60) 
 Light of Intelligence 

Accessing things according to a very different measuring rod than that of our ordinary judgment subjects you with intelligence rather than consciousness. What is the difference? Consciousness is receptive to impressions, like the faculty of a photographic plate to pick up and be imprinted by radiation. That's the reason why one needs to purify one's consciousness from all the extraneous impressions that are damaging to one's soul. When you're not aware of what you perceive with your senses, and you're not aware of your thoughts, you are in a very high state of meditation. It is not akin to the dream state; it is akin to deep sleep where there are no images and no thoughts. Consciousness does not have a support in the object, because there has to be a dichotomy of subject/object. When this happens, consciousness resorbs into its ground, which is intelligence. For example, Buddha compares consciousness with a flame that needs a combustible, such as logs of wood. If one log is burned and you put a new log on, the flame continues. If you don't fuel it with wood any more, then it disappears. 

Consciousness is dependent upon its object, whereas intelligence is a reality that is in itself, because it carries within it the wisdom of the universe beyond the existential state. When one places oneself in that vantage point, and then looks at a circumstance in one's life, it is as though one were casting light upon the situation instead of just witnessing the situation. Consciousness witnesses the situation. Intelligence scans the situation and eventually the intention of the program behind the event begins to manifest to view.
 Knowledge is a veil upon the known.  
Ibn 'Arabi
While consciousness is personalized, the consciousness of the cosmos is focalized in each one of us; but intelligence can never be fragmented. When we resort to it, we're calling upon divine intelligence, luminous intelligence, the light of intelligence. The Tibetans call it the clear light of bliss.   

Now we have this curious interrelationship between the light of intelligence and the light of our aura. Perhaps you've noticed that if you highlight or awaken intelligence while downplaying consciousness, called awakening, your aura burns more brightly.  In the eyes, you can see that the whole being begins to glitter. That's the significance of that sura in the Qur'an, "Light upon a light." It's the light of intelligence that enhances the light of the aura. You could never enhance the effulgence of your aura simply by trying to become aware of drawing in light from the environment and radiating light. It will give you some radiance, but it does not compare with what we are doing now, because we are bringing all the levels of our being into action.  
 (Page 61) 
There's just one further thought, that by this emergence of intelligence and consciousness buried in our very body, the cells begin to dance, a choreography of light. Consequently they divide much more rapidly, and what is more, there is a co-emission of electrons. That means the elements in the cells of the body begin to disperse in the universe, in the cosmos. There's also a transmutation of electrons into photons which means, instead of just particles, there are waves of light. In that sense we are preparing our body for resurrection, because it's the body that resurrects in that sense. Matter is transmuted into energy, so it is that aspect of light that is not particle light. These waves are interconnected in a way that particles cannot be because they simply collide. It's called a wave interference pattern. This would be a kind of vision, a prefiguring of our state after what is called the death of the body. Instead of thinking that the spirit survives but the body dies, I think that the body lives too, the aspects of the body that are able to survive the disintegration of the cells and which are able to carry the memory of one's existential condition, and maybe work in a creative way in the universe.  

I'd like to introduce the story of Joan of Arc and her victory; one of the most amazing stories one could ever imagine. As a young girl of 13 she used to listen to the church bells and she interpreted them as voices. She was a very mystical being. At the age of 15 she had the impression that she was sent on a mission to restore the king of France to his throne. The British had besieged many of the cities of France, and the Dauphin was rather a weak character. Here was this amazing young girl who followed her voice, and dressed in men's clothes. Somehow by her conviction she convinced the governor of a city to let her go and visit the Dauphin who was living in a castle. That whole area was under the governance of the British. It's a long adventure. She was able not only to have an audience with the Dauphin, but also to convince him to follow her. By that time she had collected an army of volunteers who were very deeply moved by what she represented, the power that was coming through her. They rode their horses and conquered most of the British forces. Finally they took Orleans, which was a very strong garrison. It was a great feat.  

There was a magical legend about this extraordinary woman. She was then 17. She was a very frail, rather illiterate peasant girl who just had the strength of this conviction of her voices. Nowadays if somebody hears voices, you close them up in an asylum. That's the paradox of this story. After they conquered Orleans, they went to the cathedral of Rheims where the kings of France were crowned. The Dauphin was under the protection of this little maid of 17, was crowned king. Then on her way to Rouen she was captured, dragged off her horse, tortured and thrown into jail in chains. 

She faced a trial with all the learned men of the church and also the powers that be. It was an inquisition by the church fathers. Of course she proclaimed (Page 62) her innocence. She was tortured and then dragged out of the cell to sign an apparition, which means to recognize that the voices were just illusion, hallucination. The whole idea was to discredit that myth about her. Weak and distraught and broken, she signed the apparitus. A few days later she relapsed, because she realized her voices were true. She was excommunicated, subjected again to torture, and then burnt alive at the stake. 

There you see the brutality of the powers that be, the ego power of the people condemning her, and the fanaticism of the theologians in their lack of understanding. She didn't know how to argue. She couldn't protect herself. So at one point maybe she thought, "Well after all who am I? These people, they are learned people and who am I? I can't even read or write." It was only for two days I think. After that she had these terrible thoughts, "How could I be untrue to my voices?" That's when she relapsed. She was eventually burnt on the stake because there was a custom that witches should be burnt at the stake and they considered her to be a witch who had magical powers. I said she was excommunicated from the church. A few centuries afterwards the Church itself relapsed. So this little girl made that Catholic Church relapse and come back on its decision of condemning her.  

Behind that there is something which perhaps we understand in our time, and that is the feminine, that strange kind of power of the feminine which men don't always understand. I think again of my sister who was so vulnerable. The cruelty of it is just unbearable, unbelievable.  

Do you recognize something of the Nazis? That is the kind of thing my sister Noor experienced. This is very significant to me because my sister volunteered when she heard about the tortures inflicted upon the Jews by the Nazis. She volunteered to land in France with a radio in order to maintain contact between the war office and the underground forces of the resistance. It was her messages that were decisive in the victory of the allies against the Nazis. She had a chance of leaving, but she refused because she felt she had to do this. She knew the danger. 

She had accomplished what she needed to do and a plane landed to fetch her. She went to her apartment to fetch her last things and particularly her code. The Nazis were there to capture her. I was at the trial afterwards. We heard that the Nazi who arrested her said he had received a telephone call from a French woman who said she had the address of my sister and wanted to sell it for 100,000 francs. The Nazi met her on a bench and the transaction was made. The consequence of this betrayal was that the very brother of this woman and hundreds of other people were arrested and tortured. I saw that woman at the trial. She was acquitted by the judge because the lawyer said, "Well we've suffered enough through the Nazis and now it is a Nazi who is the only witness here (Page 63) against our French people."  

She was thrown in a lorry and taken in chains to the concentration camp in Dachau. She made an attempt at escaping and was placed in chains in a cell for nine months. My sister was the most vulnerable child,the most  beautiful person, an idealist. Then she got news that she was condemned to death, and the guard kept on kicking her. There were enormous hematomas all over her body. She was exposed in agony throughout the night, practically naked on the cement floor without shelter. The next day she was whipped and boxed, hit to the point that she was, as a witness said, a bloody mess. Then she was made to kneel and was shot behind her head. She didn't cry. Her last words were, "Vive la liberte." Apparently there was still some motion in her body when she was thrown into the oven, and that oven is still there in Dachau.   

There is a composer, Richard Einholn who went to France to try and retrack the traces of Joan of Arc. He is placing himself in her consciousness. He is not so much describing the story, as the other states of consciousness that young girl faced with this incredible mission. What he did was very remarkable when he got into the consciousness of Joan of Arc. 

In my mind there was a piece missing, the jubilation in the heavens is still on the earth. The crucifixion of Christ was a coronation. The cosmic celebration, which we think is in the heavens, is always coming through us whenever we glorify. 


 (Page 64) 
The Personal and Divine Vantage Points

If your desire is to attain illumination, the reminiscence of your problems as you meditate will keep on knocking at the door of your consciousness and conscience. You will not be able to get anywhere in your meditation if that cogitation is ruminating upon your personal problems. That's not meditation,  because one has limited oneself to one's notion of oneself and the problems seem in respect to one's self image.

The first step in meditation is to reconnect with the totality, and that happens by expanding consciousness. The first motion of the Dhikr where the head is turning in a circle is to reconnect with the ground out of which one has emerged. At a further step one sees one's problems as part of the cosmic drama; one can't say these are my problems anymore. For example, what happened to Joan of Arc or my sister. In that case it wasn't her problems, it was her involvement in the drama of the cosmos. That drama does involve suffering, although one doesn't understand why one can't just be happy. Why should that be? It is because the total being is fragmented, and each fragment is endowed with the most essential of all the qualities, free will.

The consequence is that people alienate themselves from the divine will and, very clearly, that was exactly the message of Christ. That's what we're doing. We're reconnecting. 

 If you just look at things from your point of view, you're caught up in a limited perspective. When you're meditating, always keep in mind that the antimony of your consciousness acts as a focalized vantage point; you see things from a limited point. The amount of understanding does hopefully increase as you evolve,  but still it's your understanding. At the same time, see the relationship between this vantage point and your notion of yourself, your self-image. You can see that you think of yourself as an individual person and the consequence is you're going to react to bad situations, the assaults on your person, by developing a kind of ego power because you don't know how to do otherwise. It draws you into your ego identity, which means discarding the main experience of your being, which includes the universe. 

That is what we ultimately mean by God. That's why it's a policy if you're doing the Sufi practices, to always bear in mind those two poles, the personal vantage point and the divine vantage point that one does not know, but is revealing itself to one. It cannot be the object of one's cognizance. What you do from your personal point of view seems active, whereas you are responsive to the (Page 65) divine revelation. It's both at the same time. That response  enables you to espy the meaningfulness that is coming through that revelation. Gradually one learns to shift one's consciousness from one's limited point of view into the divine consciousness. That's the end of the process. At first it doesn't seem possible. It seems like a presumption on one's part. 

 Emotional Attunement and Levels of Cognizance 

These perspectives are to a large extent triggered off by your emotional attunement. You can't really do it with your will. When you're meditating you can't just try to discipline your thoughts. That doesn't work. For example, you look at how you are involved in situations with people. Now at a further stage you experience your involvement in the drama of the universe. That does not mean only the physical world, but all levels of reality, the celestial levels, subtle levels, and so on. You try to get into the consciousness of those people involved in your problems; at the range we are now talking about, one has developed a skill of getting into the consciousness of other people, and it includes more and more people. Eventually you get into that state articulated by St. Francis of Assisi, "The cosmos is looking at me."  As I am involved in the problem, the cosmos is looking at that problem through me. There is a transformation of the object and the subject, the situation is not what I think it is. I am not the subject. This is the key if you want to meditate. Otherwise it's cogitation, reflection, it's not meditation. This is the key, and we need to remember that when we're meditating.  

"Do you think the cosmos is endowed with overall consciousness, or do you think we're the only ones who can have a consciousness?" I ask that question because I'm positive that the cosmos, the universe has an overall consciousness and that's what we mean by God consciousness. If we say God consciousness, we must know what we're saying. You see, we are gradually trying to understand the Cosmos a little more. For example in the time of Buddha, most people thought the stars were just decorations in the sky and there was no notion of the planet as a planet. They didn't know what was beyond the horizon. They would just go there and see that the horizon was moved. There was no sense of the planet as a reality; absolutely no sense of the solar system or the galaxy and so on. Just imagine that we have gained a knowledge of the cosmos, albeit it very limited. In the course of the eons of time, the physical Cosmos has fashioned the brain that enables us to know it. It's knowing itself through us, and that's Sufism. There is a further mode of knowledge that is acquired through us, or through God becoming us, or God as us.  

Now there is a second level of cognizance. "Do you think the cosmos gains something by the knowledge we have of it?" And then the third question is, "Do you think we gain knowledge thanks to the knowledge that the Cosmos has of us?" That's a little more difficult. If you understand the first two propositions, you can perhaps (Page 66) reach the third one. One calls that mirroring, and Sufism is based upon mirroring. If you translate this and use the word God instead of the universe, then you understand the words of Ibn 'Arabi, "God discovers a further aspect of His being by discovering himself in us, or as us, or through us." 

Now we don't know that. We project an ideal of what we think is God. If we're intelligent, we realize that it's just a projection. If we're a little more intelligent we realize by trying to imagine what God could be like; we project upon Him, ascribe to Him the most excellent qualities in ourselves. Or, we are able to somehow transpose the notion that we have many of these qualities by imagining how they could be if they were perfect. For example, we have compassion is us, divine compassion. We have that faculty and it's perhaps the key.

The notion of infinity in mathematics has its ground in the faculty of the human being to always imagine a larger number than one has imagined so far.
Poincare  

If you translate that in terms of qualities, you see that while we have some compassion in us, somehow by extra pulling we are able to imagine what infinite compassion would be like. We have some mastery, but we imagine what the most limitless mastery could be like. We never reach it, like the horizon. It's in infinite regress. Still, that kind of faculty lifts us from our personal self-image into the model of which our self-image is the exemplar. We call it the archetype and the exemplar. Somehow consciously when we are using words, we imply the archetypal meaning. For example, when we say "my Compassion", then it's limited. When we say, "compassion," then we're not talking about limited expression of compassion, but somehow we are implying an infinite compassion.  That's what we mean by the qualities we ascribe to God. Sifat.

We give vent to that quality, and that's what we're doing with the Wazaif of the Sufis. We choose a quality, but the quality is a clue leading us to reach beyond our limited mind, exercising higher faculties of the mind. Consequently, it is lifting us up beyond our limitation. It is rescuing us from our limitation which is the cause of all the trouble. That's what we're trying to do in meditation. This is illustrated by the Islamic prayer, when one prostrates oneself. One bows one's head on the ground. It's not often done these days in modern civilization.  You'll spoil your trousers by kneeling, that kind of thing. But the experience of that does something to one. It's beyond what one could ever say, an act of utter humility, not humiliation, humility, facing the overwhelming greatness that we ascribe to God. 

That is a way of weakening that ego aspect of our self-image that is intolerant of others, and replacing it with compassion and love. You see the role of (Page 66) prayer. You find that in the orthodox church. People bow right down to the ground. I've done some practices when I made a retreat to Mt. Athos and also in Mt. Zirat. One bows one's head saying "Kyrie" and lifts one's head "Elison." "Kyrie Elison. Kyrie Elison."

Sitting cross-legged can lead to samadhi. It gives you a balance so you won't topple over if you're not conscious of your body. Kneeling is a way of expressing in one's bodiness one's interfacing with the divine presence. It has a very different effect on one. That's why the Sufis kneel instead of sitting cross-legged. You find it in the early churches but then later on it wasn't practical so one didn't do it. I think for a very strong ego it's very difficult to bow. The Hindus get you to bow before the guru. But for the Sufis, the only being that one bows to is God.  

This has the effect of transmuting one's false ego, the image one makes of oneself as an individual will. One connects up with the totality of which one is a part. Seeking to become a superman or super-woman is a concept you find in Hinduism. The rishi sitting there is a superhero who has overcome the world. I see some very high-faluting self-assertiveness in it; I used to be very impressed by it when I was young. One realizes the beauty of the humility of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. He doesn't sit on a throne. That's involvement in life and loving it. Let your meditation reflect that attitude instead of trying to achieve something for yourself. It will transform you, but you're not doing it to get transformed.  

The kind of emotions that are aroused by taking that attitude are going to make all the difference in your meditation. You're not just encapsulated in the perspective of your personal problems; you get shattered by the enormous significance of your involvement in the human drama. That shattering, accompanied by being overwhelmed, is the best way of translating fana and baqa, annihilation and reinstatement. That has the power of transforming you because it deals with exactly that which is standing in your way, which is the assertiveness of the ego. I don't say it makes you meek. The dervishes are an example of tremendous power. It gives you a tremendous power, but it's not ego power, although Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says: 
That which is gained by life is the ego, but it is the false ego that stands in the way. 

 One is encountering the assault of the outer world through one's identity with what one thinks one is, and what one has been led to think one is. If you lose a finger, you don't say that finger is you. The false ego has alienated itself from the total reality and assumes that it's a reality. That would be the basis of meditation.  
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 Expansion and Convergence 

One can move one's subtle body while one remains still. At first it appears like a circle, then a spiral. Instead of dispersing yourself in the totality, think that you are encompassing more and more, encompassing instead of dispersing, embracing instead of dispersing as you expand.

One thinks one has a need to lose oneself in that totality, except one doesn't realize that one can't lose oneself in the totality. Especially if one has a bad self-image, one would enjoy losing oneself in God, in the totality which is then very difficult to reconcile with one's notion of one's uniqueness; sarmad, sarmad, alla sarmad, one's uniqueness. Psychologists are very concerned that merging with the totality acts in a counterproductive way for our personality, because we need a very strong sense of ourselves in order to be selective in what we want to ingest from the universe. One is pulled in two opposite directions. What Pir-o-Murshid suggests to do is to survey your kingdom, your responsibilities, in your meditation. Now you're reaching out, but you're not losing yourself, although there is no boundary to your responsibility. There's always more. Still, there is some containment there, some sense of, "I can reach this far. Beyond that, I have responsibilities but I'm not quite ready for them." For example, one has responsibilities for one's family and one's friends. How far does it go? If there is a homeless person who is starving, is that part of your responsibility?

That's a very paradoxical question because by helping them you're perhaps even strengthening them in their alienation from society. I would say there is no boundary to our responsibility. It just depends upon how we think. For example, there is someone being tortured in a concentration camp, and that's still happening for political reasons. Do you think that's not our responsibility? There's Amnesty International. We could do something. That's what I mean by losing yourself in God. If you don't like yourself and you're enjoying losing yourself, this is really counterproductive.  

These two attitudes are labeled by two different Wazaif. The first one is Basit, expansion, as compared with Quabid, which is convergence. When you're breathing out you're expanding, Basit, and when you're inhaling you're converging the energy of the universe and that's Quabid. The universe is becoming you; God is becoming you. One could replace these Wazifa by Ya Wazi which means outreach, your domain, your responsibility. In samadhi, you don't take responsibility, but in Sufism you're a vice-regent of God. You're taking responsibility.  So Samadhi will lead to otherworldliness, whereas this would led to being more effective in life. See the difference? You survey your kingdom. "Yes, I see there is something there, I forgot. There is a person there who needs a letter from me or a gesture or something. I was into my problems and I was trying to get some entertainment in life. It was a bore to have to think about that person." You develop a kind of kingship if (Page 69) you survey your kingdom or queendom which develops certain qualities in you, sovereignty. The Wazaif for that are Qaher, sovereignty and Wali, mastery.  

There are always two sides of everything because mastery can inflate your ego. You might want to prove yourself to other people or to yourself at the cost of other people without having compassion, like the people who condemned Joan of Arc. They were validating themselves as VIPs of the church by condemning this little girl. 

Where does mastery come in? For example, you have this strategy of the psyche to protect itself. You could say, "I don't like my resentment. Particularly I don't like my anger and my spite. If I follow the way of yoga, I become the master and I am able to overcome everything. Not only I can slow down my breath, but I can control my thoughts and my emotions. I can slaughter that, annihilate that hatred in me." 

According  to psychologists, if you do that with your hatred, it will seek refuge in your unconscious. It will be doing things that you will not ascribe to in your hatred because you will disavow it. You'll say, "No I've overcome my hatred and I've forgiven this person." But still, if you're invited to a party and ask who is invited to that party, "Oh, this person? Oh no, I don't want him to come." You've forgiven him but you don't want him to come, right? It's in your unconscious.  Perhaps you meet him in the street, that's impromptu. You had forgiven him, but there is uneasiness because there is something in you that you carry, spite.  

What I'm saying is that you must be careful of the fight of the ego against the ego; like my will against my selfishness or greed or whatever. If you remove those strategies, you suffer from terrible withdrawal symptoms. You've got to replace your crutches by something else. That's why you can't stop drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes just by wanting to. One could, in fact I did, but I wouldn't recommend it to other people because it's a crutch upon which one has become addicted, dependent. There are physiological withdrawal symptoms like headaches and so on. You replace it and build up something in yourself in lieu of that crutch. That's what Alcoholics Anonymous is doing, to build up something in yourself that doesn't take away your pride. Pride is a word that we use in a derogatory sense. The Sufis say your pride in your divine inheritance. It's a power instead of false humility which is really an inverted form of pride, this is authentic. Consequently, that pride gives you a power so you're not dependent upon that crutch anymore. That pride comes by discovering your real self.  


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The Discovery of the Real Self

Problems are devices that can lead you to what is behind that which appears as your problems. The goal is to unmask the hoax through meditation.

If you think what appears at the surface is only a clue, your curiosity will make you try to see what is coming through that clue. For example, if you see the paw marks of the bear in the snow, you might be tempted to follow those marks unless you're afraid of meeting the bear. The clue leads you to something and that leads you to grasping that which transpires behind that which appears. Think of your problems, then what transpires. Another example is the countenance of a face that transpires through what is behind the muscles of the face. The same thing is true for your problems. They are trying to tell you something. If you judged your problems at their face value, you're not listening to what the problem is trying to tell you.

When you're meditating, just turning over your problems and regurgitating them won't get you anywhere. Our ordinary minds are going to draw conclusions within the limits of our understanding. An example would be trying to observe flying fish in dirty water. You only know what happens when they've flown over the surface; you don't know what's underneath. If you could plot a kind of curve, then perhaps you would have some clue as to what is happening that you can't see.

Our mind is not able to really grasp what the issues are behind our problems. We can jump to conclusions, of course, and I suggest you try that out. For example, I think what this problem is asking of me is to  be more up-front; or I think what this problem is asking me is to be more masterly, to have more tolerance, more love, and so forth. You can jump to all kinds of conclusions and you can try to develop qualities in order to be able to meet that problem, but if you are doing that, you are trying to adapt yourself to the environment. That kind of thinking is what one calls reactionary; you're not acting, you are reacting.

To deal with a problem then, or to deal with one indirectly, there is a subterfuge. You place a buffer between the problem and yourself in order to discover yourself irrespective of the problem. For example, Beethoven illustrated this in the Fourth Piano Concerto when the orchestra came with a real wallop, PA BUM PA BUM, and he reacted hum hum hum. He refused to react.

In your meditation think to yourself, "If I just turn over my problems in my (Page 71) head I would be reacting, but the example of Beethoven taught me not to do that. That doesn't get me anywhere."

 Simply think of your meditation as a sabbatical from your problems. Downplay your thoughts with regard to your problem. It's very difficult to do it with your will because the thoughts regarding your problems are very compulsive. Emotion works much stronger than will and so occasionally we need to give ourselves a treat. Think of something you really like. I listen to music that I really like. If I feel a bit upset about something, that's one of the things I do. Music has a way of bypassing the mind. That's the reason for meditating, we bypass the ordinary mind.

Therefore you can't rely upon your mind to sort out your problems; they grip you and hold you in a certain consciousness. The thing that grips one the most is being in love. Being in love with a person is sometimes rather deceptive, so it's better to be in love with God. If God for you is that concept, you could be in love with love. 

The consequence is that being in love does something to you. It awakens a lot of enthusiasm for which you would be prepared to sacrifice anything. On one hand is the drama of life and the other is the wonder that comes through. Just imagine the heroism of Joan of Arc. We were talking about her martyrdom; her wonderous wounds. Somehow, there are people who are tortured and experience incredible joy, especially if they are tortured out of their dedication to righteousness to an ideal, like Christ. You might think it's morbid but it's cosmic. It's like the joy of release from the constraint of suffering. It's a victory over defeat.

Life is such a rich offering at our disposal. Allow yourself to delight in the thought of having landed on planet Earth and experience the wonder of just looking at the stars. That can be so gripping to your emotion that you might feel shame at letting yourself be caught in your problems. Must you keep a grudge against someone when life is offering you such a glorious opportunity? It's like being invited to the divine banquet and spending one's time picking up crumbs on the floor. 

It's that discovery of your real self that will help you overcome those shadows, as Jung calls them, those aspects of yourself you dislike and hold you to your personal ego. That is where prayer can really change one totally, because it will enlist beautiful qualities in you that you project upon God. In order to project them, you have to awaken them in yourself.
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 Exalting in Glorification 

There is always that dichotomy between the divine and the human vantage point. If you're just in your personal vantage point, you're like everybody else, you'll never get anywhere. You have to bring in that other vantage point, and the best way to do it is to exalt in glorification.

We don't know how to glorify because we don't like ritual. It seems like show biz. I remember an occasion when I was leading a meditation on light. I opened my eyes and looked at people and I found they weren't any more luminous that before. I wondered to myself what I was doing there and if I was wasting my time. There are many other things I could do. The next day, which was Easter, we had an altar in the middle of the hall, with a lot of candles, and we were dancing around the altar with our candles. Everybody had light in their eyes. I thought to myself, "There you are. You don't like ritual but you see that it works." That is because one is creating an environment that is conducive to calling certain emotions or realizations to the surface.

I have difficulty with conformism, like you have to say five prayers a day if you're Muslim. If one is imbued with a spirit of freedom one doesn't like people to say what one is supposed to do. But when I walk in the streets of Cairo during Ramadan and hear the call for prayer, everything stops. The trams, the bicycles, everything. Everybody puts down their prayer rugs and there are thousands of people bowing. I look at the faces of these people, transfigured just by the act of glorification, and I see it really works!

Meditation is a very live experience for you if you do that. You are transformed by it; otherwise it's stress reduction. There's nothing wrong with stress reduction but it doesn't give you illumination. I remember talking with Maharishi about it, and I said: "Well, of course it's easier for you because you don't refer to God, so it's much easier for people if you don't talk about God."  I remember somebody saying to me: "Pir Vilayat, if you didn't bring God into your talks you'd have much more public attendance." I told him that's not what I'm looking for. Anyway, Maharishi said: "Well, I'll bring God in gradually, but you see I want to prove God by levitation." I don't think that's the best proof.

What I'm saying is that you're sitting there so it's not a ritual; you're not in a church, you're not exactly repeating the prayers of Islam or the ritual in Hinduism with the flowers and the oil and fire and so on. You don't have that support, but you're providing the support yourself that enlists ecstasy in your being. That's why we started by self-examination because it is your personal vantage point you use to look at your problems. You have to do the opposite.
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You have to highlight in yourself a longing for the unattainable, a need for splendor. It is something in you that is there, but you are not giving satisfaction to it. You have to do something like look in the eyes of a baby, listen to the B-Minor Mass of Bach, or  something that really lifts your soul. Think about that when you're meditating, or play the music!

 Developing Skills 

Now, there are skills which are effective. For example, the practice we did with our fingers on our senses. It's a skill which helps you to turn within. Perhaps you notice it works much more effectively than if you try to turn within, because you are doing something to your body by blocking its ability to communicate with the outside world. That has an immediate effect upon the setting of your consciousness.

The other practice is using breath as a lift to hoist your consciousness into the higher spheres. That is a very effective Hindu technique in Yoga. What I'm saying is when you meditate don't let yourself get bogged down by trying to figure out your problems with your mind. Turn the other way and just think of something that is uplifting.

There is something else in Muhasibi, in self-examination which started by our objectives and our motivations. If you want to know what your qualities are, ask yourself what your defects are because your defects are the shadows of your qualities. Suppose that instead of trying to figure out what the qualities are that you need to develop in order to meet your problems, forget your problems for the time being and as you turn within think to yourself: "There seems to be some quality that is trying to come through me at this moment. Strange, it's a quality that I never worked with before." You'll notice, for example, if you look back at your life in retrospect, perhaps you will remember there was a time when what was important for you was to be of service. Or there was a time when what was important for you was to have mastery over situations, or understanding, love, compassion, kindness, or communication with people. One goes through different stages in one's life. That's what the Sufis call Makum - different stages.

In your personal experience, ask yourself: "Now, there was a time when I was geared to a certain quality that was very important to me and I was looking everywhere to see if I could see this exemplified in people. I could see power exemplified in the lightening and thunder. I saw peacefulness exemplified in the lake, in the high mountains. At this stage in my life, I just feel there is a quality that is coming through and I can't quite put my finger on it. If I read the lists of Wazaif, the ninety-nine names of God, no, I can't say there's one of them that says exactly what's coming through. I don't know the word for it, but still, I just feel there's a quality coming through me that is so important. It's (Page 74) just like the chicken in the egg that's trying to break the shell. If I don't acknowledge this or I'm not aware of it, it will be stillborn. It needs a support of my awareness and also of my nurturing it."

This quality didn't seem to have anything to do with your problems. I've made experiments to ask people to do this and see if the quality coming though is the same quality they felt they needed in order to meet the challenge of their lives. The trouble is in their mind they would still think of their problems. It's very difficult to find out if one can grasp the quality or several qualities coming through without being concerned about their effectiveness in dealing with one's problems. What I've done myself is, all of a sudden I see that quality and I see that is the best solution for my problem. If I tried to figure it out with my mind, I wouldn't  have seen it, because the mind is deceptive. That is a way of seeing the impact of your being upon your problems.

 Working with Energy 

Now, do the breathing practice of shaghal that was described earlier in chapter eight. Inhale four seconds, hold your breath eight, exhale four, with your hands in place to cover your senses. One becomes aware of one's blood pulsing, which gives you a rhythm, like a metronome. Think of the past as you are breathing through the left nostril, and the future as you are breathing through the right.     Try to get to a point when you are able to breath very slowly to increase the amount of time when you inhale or when you exhale or hold your breath. Build up to five-ten-five. Some yogis are able to hold their breath for a few hours. In fact, they are buried under the ground and they come out alive. It's a state of hibernation, and I think it's possible samadhi is a state of hibernation.

The more peaceful you are the longer you can hold your breath, and the longer you can exhale the longer you can hold your breath. There's a way of slowing oneself down, and the consequence is your heartbeat and your blood pressure will slow down. I developed a technique where you lie down on your stomach or rest on something and you dilate your arteries. You don't try to relax because your mind turns around fast and it takes a long time to do that, but you can just imagine arteries in your arms opening up and your blood pressure can go down. That's why I say watch your breath. If you are aware of it, it will slow down. Don't try to slow it down. It is in exhaling that you relax.

Come back to this breath and inhale four beats, holding your breath sixteen beats and exhale eight beats. It is only good to do that if you develop the muscles in your abdomen and the diaphragm. Withhold your diaphragm because if you don't have strong muscles and you exaggerate your efforts in trying to hold your breath, the diaphragm will be pushed downwards and will affect your pancreas and your liver and even your heart. That's why the Sufis are very (Page 75) careful not to advise people to hold their breath as the yogis do. Strengthen the muscles in the throat too so that you avoid having damage to your thyroid, or parathyroid.

Now think of the sword that cuts the guilt, the conditioning of the past. As you hold your breath, just experience that moment of freedom. Maybe it's relative freedom. I don't know whether one can just free oneself from guilt that way but, you make a pledge. As you exhale right, you think of the future. We are often thinking of the future, our plans, projects. We have our fears about the future, concerns. Those projects are going to pull you forward into the future.  

That's why the pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past. Amongst your concerns there is a projection of how you could become in the future, which pulls you forward. That's what they call retrocausality.

One can also limit oneself by one's projects, one's scheduling. I'm not saying you should not schedule, but one becomes dependent upon one's prospects and successes; it can even become addictive. When you are breathing in through the right nostril, think, what if your projects would fall through? You prepare for a collapse of all that you projected for the future. That's something like the dark night of understanding, but applied to our projects. It's a safeguard because otherwise you would be very disappointed if your projects don't materialize. If our quest is freedom, then it is not only freedom from conditioning but freedom from one's own projection from the future.

That's what happens when you hold your breath. As you exhale left you look at the past and you see how your preconfiguration of the future has freed you from the past. We think of the past like our guilt; when we think of our guilt we're right back in the past. Things have changed since that time; that person changed, we have changed. Most of the stars we're looking at don't even exist anymore. It's the past. When we look at our guilt we're looking into the past. It's our way of thinking to understand how the past has been processed by our pledge in the present and by our projects for the future.

Now inhale through both nostrils. Become aware of the energy that rises in the center channel of your spinal chord, which is the sensory motor, central nervous system. Hold your breath and concentrate on the pineal gland and when you exhale, first you concentrate on the two descending channels, right and left.  Then, as you inhale, concentrate on the way those two lateral channels merge at the bottom of the spine, and move upwards. 

In India it's called the meeting of two rivers, and that's why the great centers of pilgrimage are where two rivers meet; that's where they build their temple. There's a breakthrough in the positive and negative current. Electrical (Page 76) currents get together, there's a breakthrough of energy, and that energy rises in the spinal chord. One is arousing what they call the serpent, energy, Kundalini at the bottom of the spine. 

The central nervous system is subjected to our will, our decision. Yoga is based upon the preponderance of the central nervous over the autonomous nervous system, functions that are generally catered for, like our circulation of our blood, nervous impulses, hormonal secretions and so on. All those functions that the autonomic nervous system takes over can fall under the volition of the will.  If you think you are encouraging the flow of energy from the lateral channels into the central channel, it helps the support system for your will. It's able to take over functions that are normally cared for by the autonomic system. That works at the level of the psyche, too, so it enables you to control your thoughts, and so on. But it's a technique that requires total dedication and concentration.

So far we have been working with energy.  Now I want to draw your attention to a Tibetan motto that says this: The mind rides the wind. The wind is energy, for example, your magnetic field or the energy in your nervous system. The mind, your way of thinking, varies according to the nature of the energy you are working with. Tibetans make a distinction between the gross mind, the subtle mind, and the very subtle mind, gross energy, subtle energy, very subtle energy.

The gross mind is the mind that interprets phenomena, or reacts to phenomena. For example, when you're meditating and you reflect upon your problems, you're utilizing your gross mind. The subtle mind is the creative mind, that's what we do as we turn within and we imagine how we could be. It prevails over the gross mind. When you are seeing things in a creative way, you are not totally subjected to your interpretation of situations. You are acting upon the environment instead of allowing the environment to act upon you.

The subtle mind is exactly what we meant by Jabarut, where one's thinking is not based upon experience at the existential state. It seems to be inherent in our own thinking, but we're not aware of it because we base our know-how upon experience. If we downplay our dependence upon our experience, that mode of thinking begins to emerge. In order to let the creative mind be active you have to identify yourself with your subtle body, or your aura. To enlist the activity of your very subtle mind you have to let go of any crutches you get from your experience. In addition to that, your sense of identity has shifted into being the knower, in being an intelligence rather that a consciousness. It's letting the divine revelation prevail over one's own acquired knowledge. Consequently, one is thinking and seeing things from the divine point of view. Newton said: "I think as God thinks." A lot of people thought that was ridiculous, "What does he mean he thinks as God thinks?" Actually, he was quite right because if one has any clue as (Page 77) to how the universe thinks, it is because one's thinking is of the same nature as the thinking of the universe.

As you're breathing in through both nostrils, you imagine energy rising in the central nervous system while there is an inflow of energy from both lateral channels. That energy acts as a lift which carries your consciousness upwards.  Your consciousness is hoisted above the perspective of the world.  

While you're doing that turn your eyeballs upwards. This stabilizes them and you encounter a very different mode of thinking to the rather unstable, quivering kind of thinking of one's usual state of consciousness, or even one's dream consciousness. There is a relationship between the eyes and the attunement of one's consciousness.  

Curve your tongue and press the bottom of your tongue against the palate. This has a very definite effect. It enhances the flow of spinal fluid in the four ventricles of the brain, and if your tongue is well back, the pressure will eventually affect  your pineal gland. This practice really has a tremendous implication in one's body functions. The effect of exercising some pressure on one's pituitary gland will be the secretion of beta endorphins, a morphine the body produces itself. This gives one a certain amount of immunity against pain and will also give you ecstasy. That's why the yogis say they have a taste of the nectar. These are yoga techniques.

 Awakening in Life 

Your objective is not samadhi. The energy that flows downwards through the central nervous system and then bifurcates left and right in the autonomic nervous system leads to the state the Sufis call Tawhid, which is awakening in life.  You see the divine intention. You can't figure it out with your mind. That's why we can't understand why things happen the way they do; it's totally incongruous sometimes. One overcomes the limitation of one's finite mind and then one sees the whole working of things; it's like awakening into life. The final words of Pir-O-Murshid Inayat Khan, before he died, were:  
When the unreality of life fades away, its reality strikes my heart.

One sees meaningfulness where one didn't see meaningfulness. Pir-o-Murshid tried to express that in words when he said:  
The fulfillment of the divine purpose is to be found in the human being who is God-conscious.  
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Being conscious of the divine purpose has the effect of your fulfilling that purpose, or being the fulfillment of that purpose. There are two ways of doing it.

Every now and again when you're meditating, literally shake yourself. Just shake yourself, now! Awaken! Be very, very alert. It's very healthy to do that, instead of getting sclerosed. You do the same thing with your glance because again,that's a feedback system. Your glance becomes very alert, like the eyes of an eagle. I remember being invited by a doctor in New York to meet his father in a rest home. His father was accompanied by a psychotherapist. I've never seen a glance like that of the psychotherapist except in the rishis in the Himalayas. You can't believe how he was looking at people. I've got an eagle, and that's how the eagle looks at me,  right into my soul. That's being awake in life, where you don't have your eyes closed as in samadhi, with eyeballs upwards and tongue pressed against the palate. You're right there in the here and now.

You must be wary of the simplistic views of finite minds, people say what it's all about is being aware of the here and now. No, it's being aware of the way the everywhere and always manifests in the here and now. 

I'll end with these words of Preston Milford, who was an American poet: 
I wish for nothing less than the impossible possibility. Infinity in a finite fact, and eternity in a temporal act.  

That's what I mean. You experience the bounty of God in your finite being.








Transformation and Illumination


by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan


Inspired by the Teaching of
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

First Edition, February 1997
Second Printing, July 1997


The material in this volume was drawn mainly from Keeping In Touches, issues seventy through eighty-five

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 





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Cosmic Practices Based On Inayat Khan's Teaching
 
We occupy only as much horizon as we are conscious of.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

1)  Simply envisoning the starry sky has the effect of expanding our consciousness. 

2)  Also, identifying with our magnetic field, and particularly with our aura, is consciousness expanding. However, Hazrat Inayat Khan draws our attention to our need to hold this magnetism while expanding it. This means: consciously radiating while avoiding dispersing the energy thus generated. Action develops magnetism, and repose controls it. This is why active people always develop their magnetism but are unable to hold it. It is like earning money from one side, spending it on the other, and always being without. 

3)  Applying Hazrat Inayat Khan's teaching, we explore further horizons. 

4)  After the manner of the Sufis, we always envision ourselves as a ramification of the One and Only Being. 

5)  This has the effect of expanding our sense of identity. For example,envision that it is the divine power that is coming through you and you will feel a wider expanse of power extending in your outreach. Likewise with the extent of your compassion, or the reach of your awareness. 

6)  Concurrently, you will gain a clearer sense of your influence on the people you are involved with as well as the prevailing circumstances and your physical environment.

7)  By being aware of your outreach, your impact on your social and physical environment and life circumstances will increase. 

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Every individual has his own world, and the world of one
individual is as tiny as a grain of lentil, and that of another 
as large as the whole world. 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 a mechanism that works by the thought-power 
of each individual soul.
 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 (Page 3) 
A Dream in a Dream


Several components of your being are trying to speak to you in your dreams. Or is it that what you think you are is interrogating your deeper self, only to find that the layers of your being are part of a many-tiered puzzle in infinite regression.  Will you ever reach the elusive depths? Umpteen obstructions block your access. Yet those thwarted pieces of your being beg for recognition, cry for expression - to play their role in fashioning your being. Imagine what we are missing out by neglecting to listen in!

Of course thoughts, emotions, images are jumbled like radio waves in the atmosphere or eddies on a lake. To your day thinking, you only express a slither of what you imply. And what you imply even eludes your own awareness. Maybe it's the job of the Shaman among the wiser minds around you to earmark a flash of the emotions behind your words, your semantics, the effigies of yourself which you project in your narratives, the myths concealed behind your reality. But the wise are rare and far between and one is indeed privileged to have any such wizards around. So one is left with the alternative of falling back on the wise person mysteriously lurking within in one's dreams or aroused in rare moments of vivid lucidity.

The forced tempo of 'real life' estranges one from one's dreams. Our longing for life to be a dream come true is condemned to the wastepaper basket of utopia except - except - if one is prepared to fight for it at the cost not only of great strife and stress, but pain to oneself and others, and of course incurring the scourge of being labeled a freak. On the other hand, society sees to it to marshal people within the limits of the common denominator called the 'norm', which operates as a salutary safety valve against whimsical, incongruous aberrations. It is the correspondence of our dreams to our everyday life that guarantees their relevance and saves our creativity from the entropy of erratic fantasizing.
  
A whole barrage stands between the deep yearning of one's soul and the 'real world': our involvements, the desires of our bodies, of our hearts, of our minds, our likes and dislikes, our vulnerable self-image, our upbringing, our conditioning, sheer survival. One tends to slip down to the lowest common denominator, the path of least resistance. One would no doubt find it easier if chances opened up to give one an opportunity to prove oneself to be a hero. But they do not come to us that way, we need to create those opportunities.

Of course in your pensive ponderings, scan yourself, confront your motivations with the power of truth to eliminate insidious self-deception and justifiction.  
(Page 4) 
But while revealing its secret step by step when cross-examined, by virtue of its need to parade a masquerade of validation, our psyche covers up the deeper frustrated motivations conspiring in our soul. Unless you succeed in piercing this smoke screen in meditation (or hypnosis) it is in your dreams that some clues as to these deep springheads of your soul may erupt. Images, effigies, scenarios blurred or distinct may project themselves on the screen of your dormant mind with sufficient force to buffet your memory when waking up. The chances are that our interpretations of them are afflicted by wishful thinking or sheer conceit or dusky misgivings.

If in deep meditation, turning within, you may be able to spot a deeper motivation that your psyche will concede - the cause spurring the cause, whereas turning upwards, you may grasp lots of different values, sometimes at loggerheads, sometimes reinforcing one another. Is it your quest for beauty? Is it your pursuit of excellence? Is it your honoring truthfulness? Is it your concern for compassion? Is it joy? Is it peace? Is it love? Is it accomplishment? Is it wisdom? Enlightenment? Freedom? These may conflict and not tolerate any compromise. Your soul may be pummeled, pulled in opposing directions as in a tug of war, or etiolated in a challenging quandary. In no way could you expect to solve the riddle you are faced with because everything is important, everywhere are priorities and priorities of priorities.
 
Your dreams may however prove of good counsel because they bypass the mind's commonplace rationalizations. The key is accessing your dreams through your meditations. Meditation skills may be devised to auto-suggest to yourself a pilgrimage into your dream world.

But watch out for the emotions lurking behind the imagery of your dreams featuring fleeting incongruous effigies. This is where the message incubated in your dreams explodes with the greatest thrust. 

Gauge its compelling urgency, its insidious forcefulness. It may catch you unaware, not realizing how important the emotional need it conveys is to you. The emotions of the heart are imperative enough and cannot always brook their inability to adapt to real-life situations. But the nostalgia of the soul is overwhelmingly compulsive when unmasked and arouses a challenge to the status quo of one's life and the established order or routine built over years of dedicated hard work, perhaps because it affects one's self-validation so deeply. This nostalgia erupts in every recess of one's mind and sparks the emotion of the heart which delights in rising from  the personal emotions into responding to its more cosmic source.
  (Page 5) 
To access the emotions at the soul level, the ordinary dream will not suffice. It takes the tour de force of awakening from your dream into a 'dream within a dream'. You dream that you are dreaming of images, while realizing that these are mere projections of your creative mind. But at the level where you are, there are no forms, no metaphors, no mental constructs, just ecstasy and realization.

 (Page 6) 
The Inner Experience of the Mass


 I. KYRIE: Confronting Guilt. 

(1) As we exhale, we apply the alchemical process - separating, earmarking the idiosyncrasies in us which we dislike and those we gladly own, and drain the former (filtering in Alchemy).
(2) Suspending breath in Kasab, we grasp the instant of time, where the process of becoming is intersected by the transcendental dimension of time. Here is an opportunity for a fresh beginning. This is triggered off by making a pledge.

 II. CHRISTE 

Only then can we deal with resentment. Think of Christ forgiving the Roman soldiers who were torturing him. A clue is found in applying the alchemical process of distilling. After draining off the scories, one cleaves to the essence of one's being, fostering an attunement where one is more ready to forgive.

 III. CREDO 

See yourself as a wave in the sea, the whole sea emerges as each wave, your body as being made of the fabric of the galaxies that spewed forth at the Big Bang, 

or your personality as being the outgrowth of a seed - a code - but you can actuate much more in your personality than what has come through so far.

Now see that it is all one being and it is only your own notion of yourself that makes you think that you are an individuality.

Now see that the Totality converged as your being transforms itself through focusing its will as your will.

Can you stretch your mind to reconcile the irreconcilable: to accept that you are like the apex of the totality and yet an individuality?

 IV. INCARNATUS 
de spiritu sancto ex Maria.

Participate consciously and volitionally in your rebirth, resulting from an excellent integration of, on one hand, the fabric of the galaxies molded through eons (Page 7) of time into your body and in our personalities through the cultures of Planet Earth woven into our ancestral legacy: and on the other, our unique representation of our inheritance of the divine archetypal nature manifesting as the many-splen-dored universe and in us as it diversified in the descent through the spheres.

 V. CRUCIFIXUS. 

Accept your suffering as your share in the global burden of suffering of people and animals in the world today and ever in the past. See what it does to you. Does it make you bitter or more sensitive to the tribulations of others? Note that it makes you more thoughtful, cautious. In fact it is a catalyst of growth to make you mature and a bountiful personality.

It will occur to you that suffering is the signal accompanying the process of disintegration that is the necessary precursor of a new integration: rebirthing.

But this realization may be carried deeper: Once you have accepted your own annihilation and reinstatement, you will notice that

(i) your representation of the physical world falters, giving way to an overall grasp of matter that tallies with that described by physicists;

(ii) Your simplistic self-image will evaporate, giving way to the paradoxical wholistic self-representation of your psyche which we have already encountered.

Such is the discovery followed by a transformation sparked by the enhancing of the centrifugal, centripetal, ascending and descending forces in the practice of the dhikr.

Hence Crucifixus and Resurrexit are inextricably linked in their complementarity.

 VI. RESURREXIT. 

However a remarkable feature stands out in Resurrexit: that by accepting dissolution, one becomes vulnerable, hence malleable which is a condition that is favorable to undergoing a process of molding. It is a matter of jolting oneself in a position of precarious equilibrium (Kemal in Sufic terms), which optimizes the effectiveness of the slightest catalyzing force. (Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures).

If we carry this further, we will realize that to resurrect, one needs to extract the quintessence of one's know-how and personal characteristics from its contingent underpinning, thus becoming very ethereal and consequently vulnerable. In fact (Page 8) one feels like pure spirit: strong in a strident way yet imponderable.

 VII. SANCTUS. 

Call me!

We have now reached the stage where it is incumbent upon us to make a pledge. This is a different pledge than the one we made when recollecting our guilt, but a pledge of fealty, of service, like a knight, to the 'powers that be', that is the Spiritual Hierarchy of the Government of the World.

This is the moment to confront ourselves, make an introspective inquiry into what our real motivations are in life (called Muhasibi by the Sufis) and take clear decisions as to our future course.

 VIII. HOSANNA. 

He comes in the name of the Lord.

The consequence is that we now have found our real being. Now only are we empowered to recognize and honor the holy status of our real being which was covered before under a masquerade of albeit well-intentioned pretense.

Furthermore this is the attunement which will enable us to establish a thought-bridge with the masters, saints and prophets who form the hierarchies of the Spiritual Government of the world.

 IX. DONA NOBIS PACEM. 

Heretofore we had been pulled in two seemingly mutually exclusive directions on the horns of a dilemma by on one hand seeking to achieve sometimes simply indulging in covetousness, involve ourselves with people, sometimes on a power trip and on the other hand our quest for freedom and peace. Our power to attain our objectives was eroded by our incurring the spill-over of the agitation of the world: reacting rather than acting. Now we discover the sovereignty that arises out of the ultimate freedom: freedom from conditioning. Delegating the divine sovereignty confers upon us an ascendency which enables us to fulfill the purpose of our lives.
 (Page 9) 
Psychological and Transformational Stages of the Mass

Some of the more traditional religious ceremonies are preceded by a procession exhibiting festive pageantry. Participating in a procession fulfills our need to discover whatever is holding us back from our quest and release ourselves from it.

But it is in the custom of performing ablutions that our sense of guilt is sparked. It brings home to us the importance of confronting our conscience as we recollect having offended or abused or harmed a fellow being. By the same token it draws our attention to the immaculate nature of that deep core in our being in which we discover the sacred.
There is a deep core in our being that is of the nature of a mirror that can never be tarnished by the impressions upon it.  
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Just as in the Catholic Mass, we first need to go through the Kyrie and Christe Eleison before participating in the Gloria. We cannot approach the immaculate center of our being without coming to terms with our guilt. To be honest with ourselves, (otherwise it would be a masquerade), we resort to ponderous soul-searchings. Memories of forgotten incidents besiege our minds and pummel our emotions. Our reason will come to our rescue, furnishing us with the most unconvincing arguments intended to justify ourselves. We may fall for these unaware, yet our conscience may not feel totally assuaged.

Our assessment of our guilt avers itself not to be too reliable. It easily overlaps with our resentment. We may feel guilty for having allowed ourselves to be abused, or co-dependent. Anger serves as our defense system. But we need to clearly distinguish between rage and outrage. Consider rage as the personal dimension of outrage and outrage as the impersonal dimension of rage. Rage can degenerate as hatred; outrage can erupt into heroism.

 Toying with the impelling emotions generated in the drama of our lives, religion avers itself to be our saving grace. By grasping the splendor in the heavens behind the iniquity in the earthly drama we are lured out of our self-pity, which helps us to heal. Is it worth missing out on the Gloria by being waylaid by our hurts in our 'storms in our teacups', when life in all its glory beckons us to participate in the cosmic celebration?

Is it the act of glorification rising aloft from the fervor of the congregation into the high vaults amidst the rafters adorning the colossal masonry of the nave (Page 10) as incense echoes the celebration in the heavens - or is it our incantations that enchant those celestial beings by an eerie sortilege into an upsurge of jubilation? It is as though a skylight had been suddenly opened between earth and heaven.

The Gloria of the Mass serves as a reminder that it is only out of an act of glorification that we can raise ourselves above our commonplace self-image in which we are encapsulated by our trite emotions, our greed, our lack of mercy and compassion. It brings home to us that it is our ability to honor our intuition about a splendor that is continually trying to break through the painful circumstances constraining us in the existential condition that fosters our transformations.

Of course those realms that we ascribe to the heavens are not located 'elsewhere'; they are not confined to us either. But we accede to these by confectioning that very temple built in the fabric of our own person, our body, magnetic field, aura, psyche, securing a psychological area offering us protection against the sacrilege rampant in the world, also within ourselves.

It is indeed our faith in our intuition - a kind of inborn sense of meaningfulness not based upon the judgments of our limited minds - that gives us access to the higher dimensions of our being, and by the same token of the universe. Incidentally let us not confuse faith with belief which is based on authority.

This is where the Credo comes in, bolstered by the power of our personal convictions. It is a mode of cognizance, not based upon our assessment of situations but upon the fact that our thinking is of an identical nature to the thinking of the universe when not limited by our personal focal center. This perspective emerges only when we are able to grasp the cosmic and transcendental outreach of our being.

It is prayer, the act of glorification that shifts our thinking from the commonplace mode to this cosmic and transcendent mode. The effect of prayer is challenging to our minds by revealing to us hidden causes behind events that do not make sense in our lives or that of others. In our ignorance of that which is enacted behind situations, sometimes dramatic, we tend to make serious mistakes in our handling of our affairs with dire consequences for ourselves and others. It is difficult for our minds, functioning in their limited fashion, to grasp the interaction between destiny and free-will. It is difficult to gauge the cosmic laws whereby the interplay between our covetousness and our dedication to service affects our destiny. Or how this effects our personality, our attunement and our fulfillment of our life's purpose. That the act of giving, sacrifice, relinquishing even to the point of surrender should be the ultimate issue in our lives defies rational common-sense. Why this moral injunction about sacrifice epitomized in the rituals of all religions illustrated in the oblation of the Agnus Dei, (Page 11) the lamb of God, or the immolation of Isaac, culminating in the Crucifixus of the Mass?
Those who are crucified on earth will be free in the heavens and those who are free on earth will be crucified in the heavens.    
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It is not much use trying to argue with whatever we ascribe to destiny - that is the bona fide of the enigmatic intentions of the programming of the universe. But it is clear that we cannot appraise this intention from our limited perspective. However I think that we can agree that charity makes people's personalities appealing and welcoming.

However the only sense renunciation could possibly make is in resurrection - Resurrexit. That the quintessence of whatever has been achieved in the process of becoming is feedback into the pool of resourcefulness of the cosmos makes metaphysical sense. However since that which has been achieved by existentiation is that the virtual Totality should be diversified in each of us, points to the original contribution of our personal dimension - that the quintessence of our personality and know-how must be resurrected.

It becomes obvious to one's soul-searching that one cannot expect one's being to be resurrected unless purified of its blemishes. To extract the quintessence, Alchemists need to drain away the dross. This is where one finds that asking for forgiveness is not good enough; one needs to repent, which means renewing one's pledge never to repeat the offense: the Confiteor.

 This pledge to service illustrated by Issaia's 'send me' is a commitment to accept whatever the office asks of one in terms of sacrifice to the point of persecution, torture, martyrdom. There is a feeling that those called to cosmic service are being eulogized by heavenly beings - the Sanctus. Moreover something in the human spirit surges forth to honor, venerate, sanctify our heroes who have lived up to this higher calling - the Hosanna. They figure in our sacred treasure-house as living examples of the value we treasure most. Only after this may the celebrant approach in the Introit, the altar, the holy of holies to participate of the Eucharist.
       Hic est enim Corpus Meum; Hic est enim Calix Sanguinis Mea. 
    This is my body, this is the chalice of my blood.
 (Page 12) 
According to PierreTeihard de Chardin:
The body of Christ represents the matter of the universe that is continually being transmuted into spirit (energy), and the blood is the suffering implied by the incarnate condition, being transfigured into joy.

 The ritual serves as a reminder that we do carry within us the inheritance of the whole universe which may be looked upon as the body of God. But if we are not aware of our divine inheritance, it remains recessive in us - we cannot actuate it in our personal idiosyncrasies. 
Be ye perfect as your Father.

The celebrants now return to their seats replenished by the many-splendored bounty lying in wait in their own being. Conversely by following the psychological stages celebrated in the Mass the contemplative may in his/her own personal orison experience this holy communion with the whole universe at all its levels.
 The altar is amongst the stars.
 Teihard de Chardin

The kind of peace 'that passeth all understanding' in the Dona Nobis Pacem could not possibly be reached unless one has gone through the cosmic drama, enjoying the privilege of the gift of life and suffering defeat and humiliation and despair. There is no peace equal to that at the aftermath of a storm - when one has confronted the challenge and come to terms with it. Hence the last words of Christ:
It has been fulfilled.

Ita Missa Est - the Mass is completed.


 (Page 13) 

Human Understanding / Divine Meaningfulness


There is geometry in the humming of the strings; there is music in the spacing of the spheres.
Pythagoras

The pilot of our being, our mind-brain that extends throughout our body to our whole nervous system, right into the nuclei of each cell, needs a wide scope of understanding and stimulation to reach a state of fulfillment. 

Imagine, it took fifteen billion years of the cataclysmic convulsions in the birth pangs of  umpteen cosmic galaxies to fashion the hundred million trillions of atomic particles constituting the fabric of our bodies. It took that amount of time to coordinate them to the point that they may, in their cooperation, offer a support system to the mind of the universe that we call the mind of God customized into what we call our thinking! 

The very structure of our cells and organs and the organization of our body functions illustrate laws of harmonic resonance. It bears the stamp of the thinking of the universe that evolves as its material support systems become more elaborate. Reciprocally, the support system perfects itself as it evolves, just as our brain (and body for that matter) develops latent faculties as our thinking brightens and we exult in our grasp of meaningfulness. Our thinking perfects itself as our brain (and its extension as the nervous system) gets activated. Yes, the nuclei of our body cells are endowed with a degree of pragmatic understanding which is greatly enhanced by their cooperation.
  
In turn, by virtue of our tacit covenant with the universe of which we are a part, the cosmic mind, called the mind of God, delegated to our minds, gains vistas, albeit latent in  the domain of responsibility assigned to us to ensure the orderliness of that divine sovereignty. By so doing,  we foster the mutation of the software of the universe, fluctuating it by our personal incentive.   

For tonight the teeming  world gives birth to the world everlasting.
Rumi

Since the divine mind (or mind of the universe) is the matrix of our mind, it can never be the object of our cognizance. Yet we can invite more of its bounty to percolate as our thinking. To do this, we need to extirpate the mental restrictions we impose upon our thinking by our very notion of ourselves as a fraction of the totality and by the same token as 'other than God'. That is the very principle of the Islamic Shahada:      (Page 14) 
Thou art not thou: thou art He, without thou; not He entering into thee, nor thou entering into Him, nor thou proceeding forth from Him nor Him proceeding forth from thee.
 Ibn 'Arabi
Our limited way of thinking evidences our having failed in our commonplace thinking to make the step in the evolution of human thought landmarked by the holistic paradigm - and beyond this even, realizing, that, while the fraction of a hologram functions like the whole hologram, it functions less effectively, but acquires a uniqueness that makes for variety and cooperation in the interest of the whole which would not occur if everything were undifferentiated.
Know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God.
 Ibn' Arabi
The functioning of our minds  is illustrated most pertinently by the DNA. Each cell organizes the fabric of the environment absorbed in its tissue on the model of the blueprint of the universe, which ensures that the cells differentiate to cooperate in the interest of the whole body. Similarly every human psyche is formatted by the software of the cosmos, albeit each psyche customizes the principles governing that software in its own unique way and thus processes the environment differently from its neighbor. Thus the complex structure of our body serves as the support system for that very intelligence configured in the cosmic blueprint, by turning certain genes on and others off. Even so with our minds, although they carry potentially the mind of the universe, they are diversified, thereby restricted by their vantage points and their specializations. 

Karl Pribram showed: the brain functions jointly as a hologram and as a network of circuits - may I add;  ensuring both the transpersonal and the personal dimensions of our motivations. The more transpersonal, the more the holistic mode of our thinking prevails over our personal opinion. This is what is meant in mysticism by awakening to God consciousness. It is as though one were de-scotch-taping one's  personal constraints to one's understanding of meaningfulness, more precisely one's personal interpretation of situations and problems which is exactly what is meant by maya.

But the exhilarating aspect of the whole marvel of which we are a contributing part is that the spring-head behind its superb alacrity is sheer excitement! The brain needs stimulation; the  mind needs the joy of discovering ideas; and the psyche needs ecstasy.

Dr. Alfred Tomasis, a physiologist, found that our brain requires three thousand million stimuli a day to keep awake. These include of course light and sound, smell, taste and tactile impressions. These sensorial stimuli are translated by the brain as energy pulses stimulating the mitosis of nerve cells.  We know that our body cells, particularly our nerve cells absorb light from the environment that catalyses their powerhouse, freeing their electrons from their initial constraint for a (Page 15) split second of spree into a degree of freedom, and that they are picking up and communicating sound messages. Hence the importance of music as fuel for our brain, also for our communication with the physical environment which is nothing less than a communion of light between the light fluoresced by the environmental objects: the sun, the stars; and is of the light thrust by our brain through the optic nerves and retinas into the environment. 

But contemplate now the degree of excellence attained with the extraordinary variety of  frequency resonances in the already complex atomic configuration of vocal cords, guts,  wood and metals of musical instruments, already reflecting the orderliness of the blueprint of the universe, may be further configured by the mind of God when funneled by the human as in symphonies and choruses of our civilizations! Or when the latticework of the internal fabric of stones and glass and ceramic are assembled into a statue or cathedral. Or the gossamer film of paints which in many ways are of the nature of liquid crystals already so splendid in themselves are blended into a painting! Paint, like sound, is a noble expression of the software of the universe and does not need to be fashioned to copy perceived objects like the paintings of old, or like Beethoven's description of a thunderstorm in the 6th Symphony, or Honneger's imitation of a train puffing along. Albeit the form of a flower, or the countenance of a human face, figure at the prow of the evolution of divine thought configured as form and the soul-searchings, the aspirations, the misgiving, the compassion, the wit, erupt in human emotions. These are described for example by Brahms, who dramatizes the mutations incurred by the divine being in the existential condition. The mutations represent a progress in comparison with the sounds of nature in mineral or plant life sometimes depicted in the dehumanized austerity or exuberance of some of our modern music. 

When these media are fashioned to express our creative thinking, they enrich the software of the universe. Our thinking that customizes the divine thinking, having projected itself into matter that already carries the hallmark of thinking at the cosmic level, is recycled into the cosmic thinking. Our minds and emotions delight when carried beyond the trite commonplace by the inspiration of poets, rearranging the divine thinking in unexpected ways! We discover new horizons of meaningfulness evidencing the splendor seeking to transpire through the appearance of things. Our mind-brains feast at the banquet offered by the creative geniuses who have conceived our great civilizations. We are thereby enriched and transformed.

What of the light that we awaken ourselves (probably as phosphorescence) by our visualizations as has been demonstrated by Dr. Motayama's experiments with meditators in light-proof cells equipped with photoelectric sensors? Can we imagine the delight of composers improvising musical themes emerging from inside as it was projecting an inner mandala in a visible or audible structure? Like a Toccata and Fugue of Bach or a Prelude of Chopin or a Sonata of Brahms! Most all of us have that uncanny ability as we hum randomly, yet it gains incomparably in excellence when cultivated. According to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, as we turn within in meditation, we discover our ability of awakening the sound of the universe, the audiosphere. May I add this sound is written right into the fabric of our body cells. They carry not only the memory of the sonic outbursts accompanying the birth and demise of the nebulae, whose star-dust has coagulated into the atomic fabric of our body cells, but the present resonance of the subatomic structures of our cells that are affected by our psychological attunements. What a miracle is the human skill which translates this ubiquitous symphony of the spheres into music meaningful to humans! 
 (Page 16) 
Further Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out the way to arouse the light within that flares like a flame. The  ebullient incandescence that burst out of the cataclysmic conflagration of the big bang is stored in the very fabric of our bodies. It is released as phosphorescence whereby we transform the atomic structure of our body cells into light - a capacity found in the glow worm, one which we also possess, which can be released by dint of the appropriate visualizations.

It is not just the energy of stimuli which charges the powerhouse of our brains, but the meaningfulness of the universal blueprint conveyed by these stimuli. There are configurations, of the atomic structure of the fabric of the environment and of our very flesh that our minds grasp because they are modeled on the mind of the universe. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan adds: it is not light or sound that spells awakening, but the vistas that they trigger off in our intelligence. Every 'aha' moment triggers off a peak experience - a tidal wave of delight. The spring-head of the whole phantasmagoria that we perceive as the universe, divine nostalgia, spills over into our psychological attunements as we discover the intention behind it all written right into our deep motivations. But this only happens when we reach beyond our limited thinking, limited vantage point, and limited self-image. Imagine: our psyche is garnished with our misassessments of the physical and psychological environment!

Consider the impact upon the brain cells (and similarly upon the whole body) of our mind's ability to reach beyond its middle-range and of our emotions reaching into the many-splendored shimmering gamuts of cosmic ecstasy! This is precisely what we achieve with our meditation skills, in Samadhi practices, Vipassana, Kabala, the theology of Aquinas, the Sufi dhikr. A major aspect of meditation consists in learning how to think beyond the commonplace syllogism. P.D.Ouspensky announced in Tertium Organum the advent of a super-logic surpassing the simplistic syllogism: Men are mortal; Socrates is a man, ergo, Socrates is mortal. 
Our ordinary logic helps us to gauge only the relations existing in the phenomena world. ...  We must come to the conclusion that separateness and combination are not opposites in the real world, but exist together and at the same time without contradicting each other. 
P. D. Ouspensky
What worlds mysterious roll within the vast, The all-encompassing ocean of the mind!
Jelaluddin Rumi


 (Page 17) 

Turning Within (I)

There are two directions or dimensions in which to expand. The one is the outward, the other the inward. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I have used Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's insight to develop the following visualization and concentration practices. These practices, and the ones in the next chapter, are preparation for the development of intuition.

The Initiator must give to one's pupils one's own meaning of the Sufi teachings, with added definitions, in order to make that teaching fully comprehensible to the pupil. Pupils must be told not to study the teachings but to meditate upon them. This way the teachings become a living experience, not only a book knowledge. The oral teachings given in Gathekas, Gathas, Githas, Sangathas, Sangithas of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan are as a line to tread upon. 
As one goes along the line, one observes different things which are necessary to be observed on the spiritual path.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The following are models of the way the focus of consciousness can be modulated, accompanied by the corresponding practices to strengthen one's mind in exercising mastery over one's thoughts. This serves as a first step in learning to meditate. To achieve this, one needs to train one's mind and consciousness consistently in daily practices staggered from the elementary ones to the more advanced ones.

The effect of spiritual practices is gained like interest on capital. The practices do not always produce effect when a person is doing them, but practices once done are never lost. They are seeds sown on the soil of one's subconscious mind and must bear fruit in due course of time. No doubt, conditions may  be against unfoldment, which may delay the result of practices.
 (Page 18) 
ATTUNEMENT

Ordinarily, the impressions accruing from the environment, both physical and psychological, force themselves upon one's attention, leaving one little chance of getting in touch with one's deeper feelings and motivations. Hence, the urgent need to learn how to turn within.
Each person in everyday life gives out their energies through the activity of life and, therefore, meditation is taught by the wise with posture so that the energy which is always spent in activities may be spared for some moments, and during these moments some additional energy may be taken in by the help of the breath. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Sit in an upright position and perform some of the breathing practices with which you are familiar. Or simply be aware of your breath, this will suffice to make your breath slow down. 

As you do this, you will notice that your mode of thinking is very different. In contrast with the way your mind works when turned towards 'outside', you will find that your thoughts, rather than flickering from one thought to another, seem to intermesh and blur. In the physical world, you are here and everything else is without you, you are contained in space. In the dream, all that you see is contained within you. Therefore, to prepare yourself for this unusual perspective, you need to be clear about how your mind functions, then train your mind.
If you are unable to control your thoughts, you cannot hold them. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Therefore, start from scratch by simply visualizing an object. I suggest choosing an inspiring object: a flower, or a star, or a crystal - eventually the face of a master or angel.

The first thing that may be given to pupils is an object to concentrate upon which will centralize their thoughts and make their minds still. However the mind functions in a dynamic rather than static way. Therefore, let us start with a little mind drill to get your thoughts under control:

1) STEREOSCOPIC VISION: Suppose you were encompassing a wide span of the field of your consciousness, a wide panorama. You will notice that you combine lots of pictures into a composite one. Now observe how your mind (Page 19) in its ordinary setting is continually considering several thoughts that are not very well integrated.

2) DISCRETE THOUGHTS: You will find that since your mind has difficulty in integrating disparate thoughts, it is more effective to consider each thought or thought-package separately in turn. Here is the first step in meditation: disciplining the mind.

There are three things which those who follow the inner path use as exercises for spiritual attainment: concentration, contemplation, and meditation. Concentration is an exercise to train the mind to hold a certain object steady, without wavering, and by the power of concentration there is nothing in the world that cannot be attained. But concentration is a very difficult exercise to accomplish; for the nature of the mind is such that when the mind takes by itself something such as worry, or trouble, or a grudge against someone, or an insult, it holds it without any effort; but when one desires to hold an object in mind for the sake of concentration, the mind acts like a restive horse. Once concentration is mastered, one has mastered life on earth. 

 Contemplation is not much different from concentration, the difference being only that in concentration the mind holds an object, in contemplation the object holds the mind. Concentration itself, when mastered, turns into contemplation. The contemplative person is one who easily holds in mind all he or she thinks about. 

 Meditation is something different. It is a training of the mind, not in activity but in passivity, the training of the mind to receive some inspiration, power or blessing from within.

3) SUPERIMPOSED THOUGHTS: Envision your thoughts as illustrated by a double exposure of two superimposed pictures. They are blurred. Try highlighting one picture rather than another. Now try combining them. This will prove difficult if not well-nigh impossible.

4) INTERCONNECTIVENESS: Now that you have gained some control over your thoughts, make a first attempt at relating two thoughts. See how their combination triggers off a meaning not present in each separately. This is illustrated by the classical intelligence test for monkeys to determine if they see the relationship between a stick in the cage and the nut outside! Grasp the meaning that the interconnectiveness between two thoughts conveys to you. At first, alternate slowly between one and the other, then toggle to and fro; if you are in control, you will enjoy the ease with which this takes place. 

5) SIMILARITY: If two pictures were organically related, for example, if (Page 20) they resembled one another, yet differed slightly, you could extrapolate between them somewhat. This is indeed precisely what the brain does extrapolating between the pictures  perceived by both eyes which differ slightly owing to parallax by ordering them in a three-dimensional composite picture. Therefore, at first, select thoughts that are closely related. Consider them both simultaneously. Gradually, you will be able to do this with thoughts whose relationship was difficult to grasp at first. 

6) SPACE: Extrapolate between the objects closer to you with those placed in the background. Now you can see that pictures that would be difficult to fit in a two-dimensional composite, can be represented by your brain more easily when distributed in a three-dimensional framework, whereas thanks to the lens of a camera they could be disposed in a two-dimensional picture, albeit at the cost of much detail.

7) TIME: Pan as you scan the horizon. Note that in order to combine the components of the composite picture, you had to remember the past ones and combine them with the new ones. You will find that your present thoughts do incorporate in an implicit way previous thoughts. However, the habits of one's thinking tend to pull one back into one's commonplace thinking and, therefore, one needs to reconnoiter the way the mind functions and learn how to shunt into the internal mode of thinking. 

You will find that both the physical and psychological environment exercise a pull upon your consciousness, forcing it into the commonplace focus. To turn within, you need to dismiss the usual perspective on things. This can be achieved by devalidating it.
The surface of human intelligence is intellect; when it is turned outside-in, it becomes the source of all revelation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Actually, if you think of yourself on the model of the holistic paradigm: (that inasmuch as one can fraction a hologram, each fraction carries the whole picture, albeit the smaller the fraction, the less well it describes the whole), rather than thinking of yourself as a portion cut out of the whole, then you clinch the clue to turning within, because then you can visualize that the totality of the universe lies potentially latent within you. (Incidentally, Pir-o-Murshid had already anticipated the holistic paradigm.)

For instance, a modern brain specialist may perhaps say that every part of the body is represented in each nerve center, and that the condition of each is relative to the condition of the whole body. The whole is in every part. 
 (Page 21) 
Pir-o-Murshid gives a clue to this by describing how he feels:
When I open my eyes to the outer world, I feel myself as a drop in the sea; but when I close my eyes and turn within, I see the whole universe as a bubble raised in the ocean of my heart. In a drop, the sea is as small as the drop; in the sea a drop is so large as the sea. And if one is to see that one is a bubble, then one becomes part of nature's government.


 (Page 22) 

Turning Within (II)



APPLYING MEDITATION TO DEVELOPING INSIGHT INTO PROBLEMS

One must learn how to apply the teaching of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan in everyday life, and how to see the beauty and complexity that one will find in life, by taking the roads leading to the desired goal.
Insight in one's problems will lead to unfurling one's potentials. In the complete unfoldment of human nature is the fulfillment of  life's purpose. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
1) Choose a thought connected with a current problem and earmark an event in the past that bears some similarity. Toggle between them to ascertain which features they have in common and in which features they differ. 

2) See how the experience of the past throws a light on your present problem: maybe the same pattern keeps repeating itself until you no longer slip into that groove. Now see if the present picture throws light on something about the past you had never perceived before, and therefore the complete knowledge of the past will be a knowledge of the whole. 

By turning within, we free ourselves of the constraint of the 'here and now', and therefore can retrieve the knowledge of the whole past bequeathed to us by the universe, subliminally latent within. 

An illustration might be helpful here: peering into a hologram, carrying the double exposure of two three-dimensional pictures, you can toggle between both pictures by oscillating the perspective of your glance; now try rather than toggling to extrapolate between both pictures. If you succeed, or in the measure in which you succeed, you are capturing a double exposure of two interspersed three-dimensional pictures. This would prove almost impossible, at least confusing. However, if there were some resemblance between these, it would be easier.

Having thus trained your mind, step by step increasing your integrative faculty, you will now suddenly grasp meaningfulness where you had not seen a relevance in situations. Thereby, you will develop great wisdom.

For the mystic, everything is connected: there is no condition that is detached from another condition. A mechanism is always running in relation to (Page 23) another mechanism, however different and disconnected they may seem. To gain insight, the mystic enters into the depths of the whole mechanism of the universe

Another illustration: with two video cameras, film simultaneously the fish swimming in an aquarium from both sides of the aquarium. If you were able to view both films simultaneously, you would grasp a connection between both films although different from each other. These perspectives would be linked by dint of complementarity. Here you are not just extrapolating between two pictures, but between two vantage points (simultaneously or in a different time frame). 

3) Practice this by viewing your problems from one perspective; then another. Now view your problems from your personal perspective, then that of a person connected with or involved in the problem. Ask yourself how all you see affects you and what is your reaction to it all. First, how does your spirit react to the objects or the conditions you encounter, to the sounds you hear, to the words that people speak to you? Secondly, see what affect you have on others, conditions and individuals when you come in contact with them. 

4) See how your point of view may be complementary to that of the other person. Even reconcile two complementary points of view in your own mind. 

5) Try to shift your consciousness into that of another person and imagine how things would look from that person's vantage point. Now try to earmark which are the points you have in common and which contradict or do not tally. 

If one is able to expand oneself to the consciousness of another person, one's consciousness becomes as large as two persons; and so it can become as large as a thousand persons when one accustoms oneself to try and see what others think. It is the understanding of two points of view: the one and its opposite that give a fuller insight into life. 

The progressive steps we have taken illustrate what we mean by shifting consciousness from the commonplace diurnal focus (explicate) to the state of reverie, anticipating the state of consciousness experienced in meditation when turning within. 

6) Now see how the problem looks when you are in your ordinary consciousness; then how it looks when you turn within.  
The external life is but the shadow of the inner reality. The manifested life comes from the unmanifested. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  (Page 24) 
But this can be illustrated better still by the following models.

 You are watching an eclipse (sun/moon). Note that they are only in alignment from the vantage point of the earth. At times other than when they appear to be aligned, their spatial relationship does not appear to  most people to have any significance - only in that relatively rare conjunction.

This example confirms that ordinarily we only see things from our personal vantage point in which we are entrapped and, moreover, what is important to us at the time. For example, the problem only exists in relationship with our particular attachment or concern. If you were free from that attachment, the problem would have no relevance and vanish. Regarding one's concerns, they are based upon one's scale of values and change as these evolve. 

7) This could be further illustrated: if you were to shift your vantage point to any location in space, there is always one point in which the sun and moon are aligned (called a syzygy in Astronomy). This ability occurs when turned within in meditation we are able to imagine what it would feel like to see things from an inexhaustible assortment of vantage points. Consequently, one would be weary of judgments taken on face value. You will realize that a defeat may turn out to be a victory and a victory a defeat.

8) A still further stage of shifting consciousness would be reached if, rather than envisioning that your consciousness is dispersed in space as represented outside you, you imagine that everything is connected like a network of radio waves. Therefore at any point in space you could access the whole scale of frequencies simultaneously. This could, of course, occur inside. To illustrate what we mean by the space inside, imagine a piece of paper so crumpled that every fragment is continuous with every other. 

This space of three dimensions is reflected in the space that is in the inner dimension. The inner dimension is different; it does not belong to the objective world, but what exists in the inner dimension is also reflected in three-dimensional space. In reality what the mystics see in space is something that is within, but when they open their eyes, they see it before them. 

9) The way to achieve this is to reach that which seems outside from inside, instead of exploring your psyche as you turn inside. Then you will find yourself in a totally different relationship with the world. You are not the subject perceiving or imagining other than yourself, nor are you observing your psyche in contradistinction to that in you that is the Spectator, but you resonate with the outer world by dint of affinity because that which seems in you is the same as that outside. The world within you is reflected in the world without; and it is the action and reaction of the two upon one another that constitutes your life.
 (Page 25) 
10) To achieve this, shift your self-image into identifying yourself with the quintessence of your being, shedding all that is the result of the spill-over with the environment or the mask you are wearing or the role you are playing that has not yet been really digested in the core of your being. 

You will find that your true being is immaculate and somewhat of the nature of a mirror that epitomizes clarity. This will give you an insight into yourself and others you never had before. 
The one who tunes him/herself not only to the external but to the inner being and to the essence of all things gets an insight into the essence of the whole being. Therefore, one can to the same extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty that delights him/her in a rose. One, so to speak, touches the soul of the thought. It is just as by seeing the plant one may get an idea of the root. In  this way things unknown are known, and things unseen are perceived by the mystics; and he/she calls it revelation. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
By doing these practices, you will develop your intuition. Here is the key: identify with the seed of which your being is the unfurling. You will not find it in your mind, but in your heart unless you will accept that mind and heart are the two sides of the same coin. Therefore, all mental activities need to be turned inside-out. To do this, you will first have to unmask your mind trips and, what is more, deal with them. If you succeed, you will touch upon the divinity of your being in the silence of thought. 
Divinity is like the seed that grows in the heart of the flower. It is the same seed that was the origin of the plant, and it comes again in the heart of the flower.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The clue to realization is to grasp God realizing Him/Herself in and through our realization of God. It is by realizing the God within that God is manifested without. But once God is realized, God is no longer only within: God is within and without and in all. 




 (Picture of Pir Vilayat in orignal, Page 26) 
 (Page 27) 
Practices Leading to Illumination

There comes a time in one's evolution when a passion is awakened for the unattainable.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
1) Continually concentrate on the light radiated by your eyes; imagine them to be two beams of light rather than receptive to the light from the environment. Meanwhile keep identifying with your whole aura.
A sparkling soul flashes through the eyes.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
2) Hold your breath between inhaling and exhaling. While you hold your breath, turn your eyes upwards. When exhaling turn your eyes back to their forward position and represent your glance to be made of two beams of light that cast their light upon the environment. Do not focus on the profile of objects in the environment; keep concentrating on the beams of light.
As one evolves, one naturally ceases to look down on earth, but looks up to the heavens. If one seeks the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
3) This practice will be ineffective unless you entertain beautiful thoughts. The very thought of being a soul rather than a body and mind will beautify your thoughts which will have an immediate impact upon your facial expression. Conversely your facial expression will affect your attunement. Therefore smile if you can; otherwise there is no point in doing this practice.
The light which comes from the soul, rises through the heart and manifests outwardly in one's smile, is indeed the light from heaven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
4) On the other hand, the key to inviting your soul's attunement to come through depends upon whether your thoughts reflect that attunement. (Page 28) 
Heaven and hell are manifestations of agreeable and disagreeable thought. The mind is a world, a world that one makes and in which one will make one's life in the hereafter as a spider lives in the web it has woven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
5) Offset your sense of identity from its usual setting so as to represent to yourself that you are not simply a visitor on Planet Earth, but are a denizen of the heavens.
 
The one who lives in his mind is conscious of his mind; the one who lives in his soul is conscious of his soul.
As the birds will never have a lasting attachment to beasts, so it is among people: the wayfarer of the heavens can never keep constantly attached to the dweller of the earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
6) Be aware of your nostalgia for the sublime.
Souls who have become conscious of the angelic spheres, even in the smallest degree, hear the calling of that sphere; and the discomfort they have in this world is that of homesickness caused by the call of the angelic spheres.
The more closely a person is drawn to heaven, the more the things of the earth lose their color and taste.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
7) You will find that if you give vent to your nostalgia for your highest ideal, you will begin to identify yourself with your soul.
The wonderful thing is that the soul already knows to some extent that there is something behind the veil, that there is something to be sought for in the higher spheres.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 29)
8) Consider your body and mind as support systems for your real being whom we shall call your soul. By so doing, you will create an inner disposition which is favorable to sensing what one means by the soul.
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, the soul natur-ally begins to see in itself the being of the spirit.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
9) Keep reminding yourself that you exist on several levels simultaneously; that you can highlight one sphere or another by your attunement.
The soul in its manifestation on earth, does not change its plane. It lives in all spheres, though it is generally conscious on only one plane. If it is only conscious of the earth plane, it is impressed by the troubles and limitations of  life on earth...The soul during its life on earth and after does not change its plane of existence. It simply quickens and transfuses it with consciousness, and identifies itself with all the things that it sees, and changes its own identity with the change of its constantly changing vision.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
10) Now try to remember your condition at the celestial level prior to your birth (or rather, conception). Know that you continue to exist and function at that level now and after death, accept you will have matured. 
We live in the world to which we are awakened, and to the world to which we are not awakened, we are asleep.

 The soul has manifested in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of existence and yet be aware not to lose its way, but regain its freedom in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
11) You will get used to raising your consciousness at will.      (Page 30) 
Illumination is obtained by rising above one's earthly condition at the command of one's own will and realizing one's immortal self which is God within.
The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes. It is free by nature, and looks for freedom during its captivity. All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life.
There is a state at which, by touching a particular phase of existence, one feels raised above the limitations of life and given that power and peace and freedom, that light and life which belong to the source of all beings.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
12) Now as you exhale with open eyes, imagine that the beams which you project are the light of your soul rather than the light of your eyes. Besides, highlighting that light will make your aura sparkle. Remember to clear the mind and emotions of any sense of limitation or grudge otherwise the light you project will not be the light of your soul.
As the sunshine from without lightens the whole world, so the sunshine from within if it were raised would illuminate the whole life, in spite of all seeming wrongs and limitations.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Such is the way to illumination.


 (Page 31) 
Heaven and Earth Interspersed (I)


We are at a stage in the Sufi Order where the need for illumination has be-come imperative. One can say that ultimately illumination is the only thing that makes sense of life and for many there is an almost desperate need to obtain it.
 
Illumination is associated with awakening and awakening may be described in terms of experience such as suddenly seeing things from a different perspective. An example would be walking in the woods and having a sense of being in a transfigured world, one that is absolutely magical. Or being convinced that your assessment of a problem is the way you thought it was and all of a sudden something switches in you and you see it in another way. Or walking in a street and instead of seeing a lot of people, you see that it's all One Being, ourselves being the fractions, although ultimately the total Being can never be fractionated. So we see that our usual representation of the world is the result of the commonplace focus of our consciousness which is rather limited. One's vantage point can change, and the consequence is that one's perspective on what one means by reality switches over, clicks into a totally different perspective.
 
We say that we are in pursuit of spirituality but there is no way in which we can define it or have a clear idea of what we mean by spirituality. We would like to make it a little more real, however, otherwise it becomes like lip service to a belief system. One way of doing this would be to think that what one is trying to do is to introduce another dimension into our commonplace lives which brings in an element that has a transforming effect. And this idea is substantiated by the thought 'bring heaven to earth'. But when we say bring heaven to earth we are thinking in terms of duality; we are thinking heaven up there is to be brought down to earth. There is some contradiction in this. The reason for this is that our picture of ourselves is usually limited and so the heavens would be other than what we think is ourselves, like angelic beings. We need to realize that there are no boundaries to our being and the heavenly realms are part of ourselves just like for example the people you love become part of you and are continually present in you. So if we think of the heavens as other than ourselves then we will not discover the features of the heavens within us. To know the heaven in us we have to unfurl the potentialities of the celestial features of ourselves, so it's a knowing that results from doing instead of just knowing. Of course we would like to simply try to define those features we could ascribe to the celestial dimension of our being as compared to those we call human. But then again we're thinking in terms of duality because in fact they are interspersed.

So if our thinking stands in the way of our experience then we have to (Page 32) embellish our thinking with greater wisdom so that we are able to overcome the limitation of our mind that is standing in the way of not only our experience but our unfoldment. An example could be illustrated by a loaf of bread which you could slice and then you could select any slice. Or if you prefer,think of yourself as being made of different components; you could call on a certain component to try to unfurl it. 

Likewise, the usual way of thinking is that we have all kinds of qualities like compassion and truth and joy and peace and so on but the holistic paradigm in our time presents us with a much richer understanding. This could be illustrated by a hologram which incorporates several images which are superimposed and interspersed, it's not like a slice of bread that you can separate. So you can toggle between the focus that brings out the perspective on one image from the focus of consciousness which brings out another image. As with a hologram, somehow our brain has the capacity to extrapolate between those two images and the consequence is that we see three-dimensionally otherwise we would not recognize three dimensions. And the same thing is true in what we call spirituality. Instead of thinking of the heavens up there and the earth down here or even thinking that there are features in us down here that are of the nature of the heavens we need to see that in fact they are interspersed with our humanness. For example in India it was believed that the Sannyasin was different from the householder but now we're trying to see in which way they relate.
 
We could of course highlight certain features in us that would typify the angelic in us as a guideline. This is in accordance with the teaching of Christ of being in the world but not of the world. What Christ is saying is precisely what I'm trying to clarify in our minds. We see people who are typically of the world in their way of thinking and of doing, we are surrounded by them, suffocated by them. If we follow the prescriptions of Christ, which are crucial to our objective, we need to see what it is in us that is not typically of the world but which we could actualize in our behavior so that we are not pulled between two different objectives or motivations. Any such attempt to define them is bound to be perfunctory but still one needs to start doing this.
 
The thing that strikes me particularly is innocence. There is a kind of cleanliness about innocence as opposed to the kind of psychological pollution which we see around us which I think is sacrilege and where the dividing line is very difficult. So it is our natural innate sense of the sacred which gives us the ability to ascertain what is inappropriate for us because it violates our sense of the sacred. The consequence of this is that one becomes very sensitive to any manipulative tendencies in one, any guile, or lack of truthfulness. So the beauty of the child is that the child will come out with the way he or she thinks without any concern for what it does to another. But the consequence is that the child is extremely vulnerable and fragile and can so easily be hurt. 

Of course the celestial (Page 33) dimension of our being is very vulnerable and in order to defend itself it creates a defense system which unfortunately takes over covering the most essential aspect of our being which is the celestial in order to protect oneself. The consequence is that one is drawn into guile, manipulation, being divisive, being ruthless, availing ourselves of the kind of support system that gives us a sense of security against our vulnerability So the whole western civilization is clearly a support system with all kinds of amenities which aim at being comfortable but protect us from the storms of life and the precarious nature of our lives. The one thing that it can't really do is to protect ourselves against pain, somehow, so that our vulnerability is still there. Therefore the support system tends to take over so that one has little time to care for one's soul. 
 
As Pir-o-Murshid says one's spirit is very vulnerable and just a little disappointment or dishonor or anger will harm it. Caring for the soul is something that the support system just cannot do. In fact we must be careful that the support system does not harm the soul. As Christ said, 'what point is there in gaining the whole world if you lose your soul'. That is our concern in life. If we protect ourselves then we can't experience life in all its fullness so it means taking the good with the bad and accepting one's vulnerability and trying to make a dream come true and being prepared to find that one's ideal can never totally jell in the nitty-gritty of the situation because that's not what life is about. Life is an opportunity so that we may become better people, wiser, more loving and illumined as we progress in evolution.
Every moment in life has its mission, every moment in life is an opportunity.
Why should this opportunity be lost? Why not use every moment of one's life towards the accomplishment of that purpose for which we are here? It is the question of bestirring ourselves to make the best use of every moment of life. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 
 (Page34) 
Heaven and Earth Interspersed (II)

 The question in the mind of Buddha and also of those in the Hindu tradition was whether pain is due to our giving in to our humanness and whether we can find protection against pain by withdrawing our need to fulfill our desires. I believe it's similar to ansthetizing oneself. Cancer patients who have the choice of doping themselves with painkillers have to decide to what extent they feel comfortable about doing so or to what extent they feel that it is separating themselves from the reality of life. 

 Maybe there is another way of looking at this. The consequence of trying to highlight and also unfurl the celestial aspects of our being is that we encounter pain when our celestial ideal is being violated. So the pain is in the way of translating our celestial ideal into earthly conditions. The curious thing is that in fact if we look at it we will realize that it is love that typifies the celestial aspect of our being as opposed to desire. Desire can lead one to slip into wanting things that are comfortable or even wanting people in our relationships that give satisfaction to our ego, that's not love. Of course in love there is the greatest of all vulnerabilities as is illustrated in the songs of the Sufis where one is on tenterhooks as to whether one's love is reciprocated. We can illustrate it by the heavenly beings being rejected by the egos of the denizens of the earth with the consequence of being bereft of their ability to nourish the earth with that special dimension that they represent. It's a kind of refusal of beauty. It's a very strange thing but it's something that one wouldn't believe unless one saw it happening today, replacing love by desire. 

 By love I mean unconditional love. which you could see as a yeast which has a transforming effect, but also makes one extremely vulnerable. Paradoxically this vulnerability avers itself to be a great power: it's the power of truth. As we know youthfulness has a resilience that is lost when the personality becomes jaded. This innocence bespeaks of reliance upon the parents and has a lesson to teach us as adults, however important our incentive, that there are times when we need to trust ourselves to the self-organizing faculty within us and beware of interfering with it by our personal volition. This is precisely what the Sufis call reliance upon God. 

 So if we introduce this into our way of doing and thinking then we have an immediate measuring rod which gives a sense of what we are doing in our lives which goes counter to bringing heaven on earth. We have a feedback system there. Then it becomes very clear that what we are doing to Mother Earth is the (Page 35) result of greed, desire having snowballed, having reached the point of gross exploitation. Ruthless cruelty is the opposite of love. This has been the message throughout the ages but somehow it has been downplayed, even in the name of religion like the terrible persecutions in Spain at the time of the inquisition. 

So far I've highlighted innocence as being one of the features of the heavenly states and then love. I think we also have to feature beauty - or we could think of it as splendor, rather than beauty. Beauty is just the way that splendor assumes a form. It could be the beauty of our thoughts, or it could be the beauty of our way of handling things, or it could be the beauty of our aspirations, the beauty of our willingness to be of service, or making personal sacrifices. There are many ways in which the kind of beauty which we ascribe to the heavens become a reality on earth. Of course it is on earth that beauty is to be found. That is why we need to change that tendency of thinking that the heavens are up there and that's where we want to reach and perhaps we will reach it when we die. 

If you seek beauty it will elude you. If you unfurl the beauty latent in your being, it will attract beauty. This is the reason why seeking for the angel in the heavens is misleading. Instead, find the heavenly dimensions of your being and the environment will be transformed. 

Pir-o-Murshid said that the state of the heavens is embryonic, that means that it is a virtuality. It means that the reality is down here because this is where the celestial virtualities of our being are unfurled in our personality like an egg that has unfurled into a blastema and an embryo and then a baby and so on, originally it was an egg. So think of the heavens as being in a seminal state but then it doesn't have to be up there, it's in us. It's not contained in us but if you think of the hologram again it's a virtuality that can be highlighted and by being highlighted it can be really called into existence. 

At the very thought of the divine splendor there is a kind of ecstasy that Sufis have often called an inebriation. Now one projects it as a reality up there but the great breakthrough is when one discovers the splendor in oneself and one doesn't dare to do this because one thinks that it is too grandiose. Pir-o-Murshsid  gave us a clue as to how one can do this and that is to accept that we have both in us, the aristocracy of the soul and the democracy of the ego. Otherwise if one were to claim that one is the splendor then one would be guilty of megalomania. But that is why Abu Azid Bastami said, 'how great is my glory.' So he did make that step that we have difficulty in making, at least I do. So it's much easier to project and think that one is enamored or enthused or inebriated by the splendor of the heavens. 

It seems rather prosaic to be enthused by the splendor that one discovers in oneself, it seems very self assertive and yet ultimately it's the same but one needs to see that it is the same thing by overcoming one's sense of otherness. By highlighting one's problems one tends to slip into a very commonplace (Page 36) picture of life which does not honor the needs of one's soul even though one is in theory trying to actualize spirituality into real life. A criteria that might prove helpful is the difference between one's needs and one's wants to which Pir-o-Murshid  drew our attention and, moreover, the needs of the soul, in contrast to the needs of the psyche although these are both interspersed and reciprocally relevant. 
 
Our pain is the wounded child, so it is the celestial in us that feels rejected by the human. On the other hand the child has an extraordinary capacity of laughing and crying at the same time. If we dwell in our pain, then we are allowing the angelic in us to be bogged into the human condition. Therefore the joy that we ascribe to the heavens is a liberating emotion from the constraint of our humanness. If we do not avail ourselves of this resort we get bogged in by our human condition. Those who are trying to actuate spirituality in daily life continually encounter the tendency to get caught in the perspective of human problems to the extent that one has lost sight of the spiritual values behind them even while one is trying to actuate those values. It's like the perspective in the hologram, if you highlight one then, of course, the other tends to fade away and it's very, very difficult to extrapolate between both at the same time. So our attentions are right in line with the need in our time which is to make God a reality. But as Pir-o-Murshid says very clearly the soul in its search for fulfillment on earth tends to lose its way. That's the reason why one needs to refer back to the original motivation of one's soul and realize that our minds tend to sclerose the dynamic intention into concepts. When this happens we get caught in our concepts of spirituality and that's not spirituality, it's our concepts. 

Therefore, although Pir-o-Murshid  said, 'shatter your ideal on the rock of truth', I think it would be better to say, shatter your concepts of your ideal for the sake of being realistic. Then you will find that your ideal will find further outreach, further perspectives that will free it from its limitation in your mind, but never give up your ideal because then you are lost.
In order to fulfill the practical duties of life, it is not necessary to forget our ideal. We can hold the ideal in the tenderest spot of our heart, and yet fulfill our practical duties. The ideal is to illuminate our lives, not to paralyze our actions. 
 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


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A New Impulse on the Dhikr

When you do the dhikr you are participating in an assembly of dervishes. If you take a magnet and move it in a circle then the energy of the magnet will be enormously enhanced so that it becomes a dynamo. So that's one way of looking at the first step in the dhikr, working with energy and as our energy field develops so will our intuitive faculties. To start with simply make a circle with your whole body, irrespective of your breath. Experience what it does to you. See that it tends to pull you out from the center of the circle so that your magnetic field is developing centrifugal forces. Think of your body as partaking in some way in the nature of the stars and planets and galaxies that continuously rotate. Imagine the flesh of your body having began at the beginning of time, being born out of stardust. Since that first impulse of life, billions of molecules have continued to live and proliferate to eventually form your body. The memory of the symphony of the spheres, of the choreography of the heavens, is right in the very cells of your body and you rediscover it when you do this motion. Even if you are not conscious of it, your body is. 

When you identify with your magnetic field instead of your body you realize that it does not have a boundary. When you identify with your aura, in a more advanced stage of the dhikr, you are doing the dhikr of light. Experience your aura as being interspersed with the planets, the galaxies, the stars, and the whole universe so that the universe is not other than you or out there somewhere but you are intermeshed with it. You could think of the wazaif ya Kabir or ya Muktakabir, God is very, very great. This sense of vastness and greatness will enhance your sense of identity and you discover that your personality is endowed with a dimension of greatness. That's why one is seeking for vast horizons, one doesn't like to be trapped in a small space. I find that it is that sense of honoring the greatness of God invested in one's being that makes it possible to forgive a person. Are you big enough to forgive? That's greatness. A puny person has difficulty in forgiving. Immediately your self-esteem is greatly enhanced.
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Now try and see if while you are doing this and you are experiencing centrifugal forces reaching out, if you can experience the opposite which is a pull towards the center. We call these centripetal forces. These forces are felt most as you interrupt the circling. You interrupt the motion when you are in the most precarious of all conditions which is when your head has turned towards the zenith. This is a state of unstable equilibrium, and in Sufi terminology it is a  kemal state. So take advantage of the labile state to let your head bend forward and inhale. Exhale in the circle and inhale as your head descends. It seems very strange to inhale as one's head comes down but it is very powerful. Immediately you feel that the energy mounts up right away but you want to capture that moment when you turn within.

The reason why people circumambulate a temple is because it strengthens the concentration on the center of the temple. So that concentration has been growing as you were encircling and now you are giving vent to that tendency to reach the center. In Sufi terminology it's Batin, the center of your being which is a void but it is also that area of your being which is most sacred. This is evidenced by the fact that there are things that one finds that there are no words that could possible express them. For instance, one might find it's a kind of misnomer to say, 'I love you'. Love is a very deep feeling in your soul and you find there is no way of expressing it in words. One shows love by loving. Somehow by formulating it in words one betrays its sacredness. That is perhaps the great secret of meditation when you get in touch with your deeper self and you don't have to talk about it. It's something you feel but you can't say. The Sufis call it the secret of the heart. 
 
When you turn your head towards your solar plexus, which is like the gravity center of your body, all of a sudden it is as though you had plunged into the depth of life and everything that you used to think was the universe seems to be right there at the surface. It's as though you were swimming under the water and somehow you can reach the universe from underneath. So you are not encapsulating yourself in your psyche, you are reaching the universe much better from inside then you could ever from outside. When you experience a vast panorama of nature or look into the starry sky at night it seems to be endless but somehow from inside you can reach the unreachable, you can reach in the hearts and thoughts and souls of humans, of angels, of animals, or plants. So when your head descends try and sustain that moment for as long as you can. 

For a moment don't bring your head up, just keep maintaining your concentration on the center but instead of thinking of it in terms of a circle think of it in terms of a vortex or as a spiral getting larger and larger. So you are experiencing (Page 39) what the Sufis call the ecstasy of the vastness and in that we see the majesty of God. For the Sufis this is a state of revelation: God reveals to you the secret of your soul. In our ordinary consciousness we tend to deny the feelings of our soul even though we may be in touch with the feelings of our heart. The Sufis call it Sirr as-Sirr, the secret of secrets, which is the secret of God, the divine intention behind the universe. Somehow you are in sync with the deep Ishq Allah, the deep nostalgia that moves the universe that you experience as your own personal nostalgia. If you go into this very deeply you realize that you can never formulate that secret in words. One is betraying the secret by trying to voice it and yet there is still that longing to do so. The power that moves the universe is that nostalgia for the unknown to become known and for this the great mystics have endangered their lives. Al Hallaj was accused of revealing the divine secret which was his love relationship with God and in doing so lost his life. In fact it is love which is the secret behind the universe rather than understanding. The terminology of the Sufis say it better than one could in the European languages. The Sufis would express it as ya Kabir or ya Muktakabir followed by ya Batin and Ishq Allah Ma'abud li'llah (God is love, God is the adored one).

So while you are inside, look at the universe as though you were looking at it from under water and you realize that only a semblance of the beauty that is to be foundinside ever breaks through the surface. That is why the Sufis say the physical universe provides clues as to the divine nature behind all life. But these clues can easily be distorted by one's lack of understanding. So you learn not to rely on what appears at the surface any more unless you are able to understand that which transpires behind that which appears. Now in regards to what affect these practices have on your daily life, they give you a kind of depth. When you are with another person you are able to grasp what is behind what they say or do or the issues behind any problems that you may have in respect to them. So it helps you go deeper, never relying upon apparent facts.

After having hit the solar plexus, let your head come up gradually, shifting your concentration upwards. It's like kundalini but you're not starting at the bottom of the spine, you are starting in the solar plexus. Prolong your inhaling as your head rises. Inhale as your head comes down and continue to inhale as your head reaches upwards again but not very high, just up to the horizontal. Try to maintain concentration in the solar plexus for some time and then rise. So it's not just a matter of transferring your attention from one chakra to the next, we are ascending through the spheres as the head comes up and so it's very useful to know the different levels. Words will help a little, but it is your intuition that bespeaks of the glory of the heavens, that will lift your consciousness up from the earth sphere. The important thing is the sense of deja vu or rather deja commune, a sense of something that is familiar to you but you can't quite pinpoint it. Looking into the eyes of a child, looking into a beautiful sunrise, listening to some (Page 40) beautiful music, somehow triggers off the memory of something sublime which we have alienated ourselves so much from that most people don't believe it, they think it's just imagination. The world can be so vulgar so let yourself be enthused by beauty. Feel your need for beauty, your need to live in a beautiful world, and your need to manifest beauty. Without giving your soul this kind of nourishment, life can be unbearable.

How are you responding to the challenges of life? One tends to take on the kind of attunement of the commonality which is low-key or even vulgar and one gets so used to it. So give yourself this luxury of enjoying beauty and beauty will act as a stepping stone towards the splendor beyond beauty. And imagination is a stepping stone towards beauty. The magic of imagination is that it pictures the formless as having form and that form is beautiful and bespeaks of the splendor behind it. One recognizes beauty because it is latent within one. So this is a new form of ecstasy. It is the ecstasy of turning within. Ibn Arabi said, 'one discovers beauty when one grasps that which transpires behind that which appears.' So that attunement puts you in a very high state and you find yourself in a transfigured world. This makes you beautiful.

As our head rises we experience awakenings at the level of mithal, or metaphor, the way that a thought can be illustrated as an image. These awakenings correspond to the chakras. We call the solar plexus, alam al anwar, the world of subtle beings like beings who have died and exist as subtle bodies and the thinking that goes with it mithal, the world of metaphor. Malakut, the heart center, is the level of the angelic spheres, the world of celestial beings, your angelic counterparts which are still there. The throat center is Jabarut, the world of pure splendor beyond the personification of angels. Your link with the angelic spheres is strengthened by your glorification of God; it's not tangible but something you can experience in your own attunement. The third eye, Lahut, is the plane of the archetypes, the divine attributes, the seeds of your personality, and Hahut is the crown center. Murshid said that the seed that is the origin of the plant reappears at the end of the cycle of the plant. As you evolve the divine inheritance emerges out of the features of your personality and this is the birth of God, according to Pir-o-Murshid , the awakening of God in you.

So these levels lead to samadhi. It's as though you had freed yourself from your incarnate state until you reach the level whereby you are the being of God and that's what al Hallaj was talking about. That's why Ibn Arabi said: know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God. You experience the unity behind all things. One sees that it's all one reality, the physical world, the angelic planes, everything. From a certain vantage point people appear as different but at that level it's all One Being. And for the Sufis that is the divine revelation. God reveals to the mystic that he or she is His/Her Being. So it starts with duality and in the end it's unity. But that is very short-lived in the dhikr and that's why you (Page 41) hold your breath after the inhalation so you have the experience of eternity. But the Sufis don't want to linger in a samadhi state because that is not honoring the purpose of life which is to be awake in life rather than awake beyond life. And that's why when you hold your breath, you concentrate on your heart center instead of on the crown center which you would have done if you had been in samadhi.

So this is just a very brief touch of samadhi, unity. In Sufi terminology unity is Ahad, but when you awaken in life it's Ahadaniat, multiplicity in unity. When you awaken beyond life there is a kind of memory of your existence on the planet but somehow this memory is enshrouded into a sense of having been under an illusion, being caught in a perspective. That's what one means by maya. So that's awakening beyond life, that's samadhi. It's knowing that you thought that things were the way you thought they were but now you realize that it was just the way you saw things. When you reach a state of immunity against your perspective of the world, you experience the most utter freedom.

So this gives you some clues as to what happens when you hold your breath but for the Sufis the purpose of life is to awaken in life. So now you are aware of the physical world, you are aware of your personality, of your thoughts, of your emotions, of your relationships with people and so on but somehow you never slip into your personal vantage point, somehow you are always seeing the different expressions of the Being of God. It is much more difficult to describe awakening in life than awakening beyond life.

Murshid said, "God discovers His perfection through our imperfection." The whole universe is the means whereby God discovers Him/Herself and you are part of this. According to the Hadith: God became in my consciousness the subject of His self-discovery and became in my personality the object of His self-discovery. Can you see the unity behind the duality? That's looking at things from high up and you realize that most people have the worms eye-view and this is the eagles eye-view. Pir-o-Murshsid  describes this as what it's like to be awakened in life. Imagine that you are the only person awake among a lot of people who are sleeping or a lot of people who are caught in an illusion. It's like going to a play and getting caught up in the illusion of the scenery and costumes but now you see the play in the eyes of the producer. That's samadhi in life.

So go into a very wide circle as you exhale. Then inhale as the head comes down and suddenly everything is reversed, you are seeing things from the inside out. And lift your consciousness to the heavenly spheres and discover the divine inheritance, the seed of your being, yourself as the plant or the flower. And then as you reach higher you don't identify with your personality anymore, or the archetype of your personality, but something much more (Page 42) fundamental which you could call beingness and you awaken! All of a sudden you awaken, freeing yourself from your trips, your vantage point, your involvement, everything. You find yourself free and awake as you hold your breath. And now you look at the world again but this time maintain your freedom, do not descend into your personal vantage point until you start exhaling and then you get back into your vantage point again, back into the circle. Exhale deeply in order to take in more oxygen on the inhalation and you will be able to hold your breath longer. Don't do it fast, do it very, very slowly. You can't do it much to start with, it's only when you get used to it every day that eventually you can maintain your concentration a long time. So this is a new impulse on the dhikr.  
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Did I not leave the unseen world in Thy pursuit?
Have I not come to this world of limitations in search of Thee? 
Have I not followed Thy footprints on this earth?
Have I not looked for Thy light in the heavens? 
But where did I find Thee, Beloved, at last? 
Hiding in my heart. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 The Sufi dhikr, La Illaha Illa 'Lla Hu: there is no God but God. La on the exhalation while describing a circular motion of the head, third eye facing left shoulder, solar plexus, right shoulder. Illaha as one reaches upwards to the apex of the circle. Illa on the inhalation while thrusting the head downwards, the third eye striking the solar plexus. 'Llah (Allah), the great proclamation sounded in the heart center as the head rises. Hu as one holds one's breath.
 


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Preparing for Resurrection

Our notion of death is perhaps the most nonsensical of all our notions! Exploring the software of the Universe, physicists never cease to be amazed by the intelligence of the planning. How could we possibly believe that all that has been gained not only by our know-how but by the uniqueness of each of our personalities should get lost from the bounty of the universe? 

If we are unaware of our immortality, we will think that we die. It is all in our way of looking at things. Our fear of death is linked with our failure to grasp more advanced paradigms of thinking: the first step in learning how to resurrect consists in widening our sense of identity which eventually avers itself to be co-extensive with the universe. 

We commonly think of ourselves as a distinct individual but if we are updated with the holistic view of our day and age, we realize that every fraction of the totality carries virtually the entire code. 

If you envision yourself as the keyboard of a piano most of whose keys are scotch-taped so you can only play a simple melody, and should you then realize that you could tear away more and more of the scotch-tape and awaken many-splendored features of the investiture of the universe latent in you, you will exult in self-validation. 

In  addition to the holistic paradigm, we need to consider the transcendental one. Our commonplace thinking thinks in terms of categories: mind, body, perhaps the soul, that mysterious unknown. The consequence is that our thinking breaks up in a dualistic or pluralistic view: the body dies, hopefully the soul continues to live - two categories. 

The advanced way of thinking is in terms of polarity: I am also my body. In our spiritual beliefs, we are so old-fashioned! We still think in terms of one time-dimension. If we shift into the new paradigms, and are able to extrapolate between two or more dimensions of time, then we may  envision ourselves as a pendulum of which one pole is moving in space-time, and the other remains unchanged. In between these two poles there are numberless transitional stages. Information imputed from our perceptual interface with the physical environment is processed upwards so that ultimately the quintessence is recycled into that level of our being where meaningfulness prevails over perception - eventually into the software of the universe. 
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As we shift our sense of identity upwards, our feeling of the process of becoming merges into a sense of being a continuity in change. Indeed the very cellular structure of our bodies - particularly our faces, that configures our emotional attunements and insight will imprint the fabric of the subtler levels of our being; for example, our electro-magnetic field, the sparkling of our aura, the morphogenetic field that acts as a template of our body and further upwards in degrees of subtlety in infinite regress. Thus our bodies will outlive the dispersal of the building blocks of our body, the electrons and protons that survive and carry some bytes of memory. This could be illustrated by the fact that not one cell of our body is today the same cell as a few years ago, yet we think it is the same body. This is because its basic structure survives the disruption of the cells. 

Consequently we can consciously and willfully fashion as a sculptor in a creative way our bodies of resurrection - that is our celestial bodies that maintain the gist of the countenance that sometimes transpires through our face when we are aware of the bounty and thinking of the universe coming through us. 

By identifying with our self-image, that is a fallible notion of ourselves, we are obstructing the shift in our thinking that enables us to by-pass our transiency which is the condition of our learning how to resurrect. The resulting miss-assessment of our involvement in our probles stands in the way of our realization because we are ultimately our realization and it is this transcendent dimension of our being that survives its support system. 

This would require then that we would need to stretch our minds beyond their middle range. We would see what the implications of our problems are from the point of view of those involved in them, and while surveying ourselves with a birds eye view in the context of the cosmic drama in all its compass, grasp the dovetailing of our lives and beings with theirs. 

In this perspective, our way of looking at ourselves and our participation in the human drama will aver itself to be just the kind of thinking that will prepare us for the experience of resurrection: we cease to limit our assessment of our problems to causation in a linear fashion in the arrow of time, or succumb  to the conditioning of our personality, but grasp as Speiser says: A pre-causal stage out of which the programing of the universe arises behind the apparent universe of our own self-image. Then we see ourselves in the universe, not just on Planet Earth or in our personal dramas (our storms in our tea-cups) and interrogate ourselves: what are we doing on Planet Earth, what is our place in the universe? 

The body then, rather than being our space-suit on Planet Earth that we will discard at death is seen as a support system. Truly enough, Pegasus could not reach the Olympias, but imprinted upon his rider, Bellaphreon, the thrust that hoisted (Page 46) him aloft. The bodiness of Pegasus was transmuted into energy. 

Admittedly while many of the recollections in Dr. Moodys Life After Death and sequels could be accounted for by the residual exercise of brain functions, the out-of-body overview of the physical shroud gives us some clues as the aftermath of this episode: Life after life. 

I quote Shems Tabrizi the mentor of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi:
   "I walk without feet and fly without wings, and see without eyes and hear without ears..."

and may I add: 'and think beyond the mind.'

However we cannot be creative be it of a work of art or of ourselves just by willing it. We have to be moved and shattered and bewondered and bemused.


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Meditation Aftereffect 

At a certain point in our search for meaningfulness, it may suddenly dawn upon us that our quest of trance-like meditations or retreats may arise from a perhaps unconscious wish to escape from a life situation (for example, parental authority or the ruthless, merciless civilization we are living in: its violence, its greed, its manipulation). Moreover, it has become evident in recent years that meditation practices can and do lead people to drop out of life in general and eschew taking responsibility in their lives for loved ones or fellow beings. 

Further, we just may be trying to validate our own personality in our own view or that of others by being special or different! Actually, we may be missing out on the inestimable value of that which has been acquired by humans throughout the ages in terms of beauty, material convenience, and orderliness: the marvel, the excitement, the courage, the vulnerability and the enriching effect of sharing joy and pain, relationship, friendship, loyalty, and service in which God is to be found as a living reality. It is tragic to cloister oneself in an anesthetized psyche that shields one from confronting the challenges of the drama of life, which both actuates the celebration in the heavens in a concrete way, and tests our mettle. There is a way of being high without being spaced-out! 

When meditating ( or prescribing meditation ), it is important to be clear about the aftereffect that the shift of focus of consciousness may be expected to have upon our personality, attunement, and world-view, and to know which practices trigger off which effect. 

1)	Since our notion of ourselves needs to be expanded when extending consciousness, we contemplate vaster and vaster reaches of space, we identify with zones of our being beyond our notion of a skin-bound material body. We may become aware of and identify with our magnetic field and/or aura. As these do not have a boundary, we then envision ourselves as being like a vortex (boundless). What is more, we tend to assume that we lose ourselves by merging with the totality of the universe. 

It is important here to keep in mind that one is both a vortex and, at the same time, something like a cell, bounded by a membrane, albeit porous. We need to work with both in combination, not just one or the other. Our minds in their commonplace thinking mode find it difficult to reconcile these two paradigms. This problem is similar to the one that physicists encountered in accepting that, since photons of light behave either as waves or as particles according to the way the experiment is conducted, they may be considered as displaying both of these properties. So it is with our notion of ourselves. 
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Our bodies (including the subtle bodies, the psyche, personality, and consciousness, etc.) are indeed holistically related to the totality of the fabric of the universe. This means that they carry potentially in them the bounty of the totality of the fabric of the universe, just as every drop of water has the same properties as the water of the ocean. In fact, every cell of the body has the same genes as every other, but in one some will be activated and in others different ones, so that by diversifying they create the change to cooperate. Thus they differ while being potentially identical, and in that sense may be  considered as "discrete entities." It is in this diversity that our freedom is rooted. A vortex is open to its environment, and in fact incorporates its environment indiscriminately, whereas a cell, thanks to its membrane, may select the elements it takes in from the environment, or secretes to the environment, while still being open to some measure of osmosis. 

If we identify just with the vortex model, we are overlooking the containment which ensures our protection against undesirable impressions, honors our idiosyncrasies, and confers upon us ourincentive. If we neglect our boundaries, we run the psychological risk of finding ourselves disoriented, spaced out and unable to confront circumstances as real (one may even invoke the concept of maya to justify this attitude). What is more, just as we generally fail to realize that an eddy does not lose its identity by joining with other eddies in a wave-interference pattern (whirlpool), and can even be retrieved, we tend to believe that we lose ourselves as we merge blissfully with the totality of the universe or the being of God. However, the objective of the universe is that the bounty of the totality should be customized in each of its sub-wholes in a unique way! Fana does not mean that one loses oneself, but only one's commonplace notion of oneself. 

2)	In meditation we learn to "turn within", which can easily be misconstrued as encapsulating ourselves in our psyche while blocking any impressions, physical or psychological, from the environment. Here it is the opposite:  by setting up a boundary segregating ourselves from the environment, we tend to merge with the totality in an inverted space. A person unfamiliar with physics would find it difficult to have any clue as to what one might mean by "inverted space." It may therefore be preferable to envision that our magnetic field or aura intersperses with that of other such fields, like the eddies on the surface of a lake as they compose to form a wave-interference pattern. It is difficult for us to realize that this does not imply that they spread out or diffract in space. A good analogy would be the difference between a short musical theme, each note following the other and the notes forming a chord without being stretched out as a melody. This happens in our dreams, where impressions are jumbled; in order to retrieve them in our memory, we sort them out in a space-time framework. 

If, however, as we turn within in meditation, instead of setting up a boundary encapsulating ourselves in our thoughts, we envision that we are protected by a porous membrane that filters impressions from the environment (at all levels of (Page 49) reality) and that we are consequently able to radiate into the environment, then we will enjoy an incomparably richer experience. Now, envision that you are not just filtering these impressions, but tansmuting them, just as we digest our food in order to use it, since we can only deal with amino-acid chains that match our own. Just as in digestion, we need to break down the ingested elements and rebuild them on the model of our own idiosyncrasies and reject those elements which, being too alien to our own beings, would prove to be difficult to incorporate, or might even be harmful. Here our sense of having boundaries will help us reject unwanted impressions, on the one hand, or filter and transmute those impressions that can be put to good use if adjusted to our particular attunement, on the other hand. 

3)	Transcendence: there can be no doubt that our involvement with life at its lowest common denominator fosters greed, limitations in the field of consciousness, and conflict, while our quest for freedom from conditioning opens the doors to the wonder and meaningfulness behind what seems to be happening at the existential level. 

Another way of putting this is to say that we must instill something of the way of the hermit into the way of the knight. Our need for freedom is as compelling as our need for involvement. Are they necessarily mutually exclusive? There is a way of reconciling the irreconcilables. One example is to love without being dependent upon being loved. In meditation, detachment frees one from the conditioning of one's thinking and the constraint of one's self-image. Freedom from the usual setting of consciousness will enable us to shift consciousness into an inner space or, alternatively, into a mode of self-transcendence.
  

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God as Archetype; The Human Being as Exemplar 

To the question: 'how can one know God?', Ibn'Arabi answers: "all that one knows of the archetype is what is exemplified in the exemplar". Roundness is only knowable through round tables, wheels, etc. This elicits a totally different relationship with what we think we mean by God. In our practices, we shall learn to recognize in the idiosyncrasies of our personality the divine qualities that they exemplify. Rather than being like a cell of the body, we could see ourselves as exemplars carrying potentially the bounty present in the template or archetype which we exemplify. This elicits a totally different relationship with the totality we project as God.
Those to whom Unity is revealed see the Absolute whole in the parts: yet each is in despair at its particularization from the whole...Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world is a person and each person is a world...The heart of a barley seed conceals a hundred harvests
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
However, there is a more profound way of looking at this: What then in this view could the archetype of our personality be if we refuse to ascribe a personality to God?
It would be a great  mistake to call God a personality, but it is a still greater mistake to deny God a personality. Each being is the flowering of the personality of God...the seed does not show the flower in it, yet it culminates in the flower:  therefore the flower already existed in the seed. 

But the breakthrough is in awakening the God within:  Believing is just a process. By this process the God within is awakened and made living. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Our notion of ourselves as the observer can be shunted backwards in infinite regress as one identifies more and more with that aspect of God which we represent as the Spectator.  To illustrate this, our consciousness endowed with the ability to imagine how planet Earth would look from outer space, or in some cases, how we are perceived by another person. Moreover, our minds are able to outreach any limits we may have assigned to its compass. As the French mathematician Henri (Page 51) Poincarre showed: "the concept of infinity evidences the mind's ability to always imagine a larger number than the one enunciated so far". In fact, our minds are coextensive with the mind of the universe. Albeit that just as in the holistic paradigm: insofar as one can fraction the totality, every fraction of the totality does not simply act as a section (like a section of an orange, for example,) yet the smaller the fragment, the less well it manifests the totality. 

One needs to make a clear distinction between belief and faith. Belief is opinion based upon authority, or custom, routine, conditioning. Faith is reinforced by opinion based upon experience. 

The mind gets easily caught in a bind. A bind is a situation in which thoughts follow one another in a circular fashion - popularly called a vicious circle. The pending catastrophe is routed in the storms in human thinking. Thoughts thus caught just as in a whirlwind become compulsory, and gain great emotional support by their very addictive nature until they explode in violence. Imagine: it is this very flaw in the functioning of the mind that begets conflicts, disasters, ordeals of terrible human suffering and terror! 

As seen from the serenity of a spiritual retreat, the disastrous effect of an ideology upon the destinies of masses of people stands out clearly. The excesses of cruelty that people will wreak upon others in the name of sheer opinion not based upon real life experience is appalling! 

The mystics of the various religious denominations seek after real experience, whereas the thinking of the followers is governed by belief. The originating revelation gets gradually distorted by what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls "the followers of the followers". Therefore the Sufis hold that one needs to base one's concept of God upon one's discovery of the traces (ayat) of God in real life. That is why the Prophet Mohammed said, "for each person his religion." Because if that belief were to fail; if at some point doubts should arise as to why the mind finds difficulty in relating the belief to actual real life experience, then the mind becomes plunged in the dark night of understanding. 

St. John of the Cross who escaped his prison thanks to the darkness of the night sees in this crisis in our thinking the way out of the bind. Now the mind revolts against its conditioning, against those who have held it trammeled. Once more there is revolution. When there is a paradigm shift in belief there is a revolution in values, in paradigms, and likewise when that shift is reversed. It is a great tour de force. But this requires some degree of consensus and marks a stage in people's evolutionary advance. 

However if the dark night serves to free oneself from the prison in the mind, it does not show the way. Therefore St. John cleaves to a tenuous spark of light in his understanding: the dawning of meaningfulness. Trust yourself to this fragile light (Page 52) as you advance towards it. It will grow as the effulgence of dawn. It represents a level of thinking beyond the kind of thinking that spins inexorable in a vicious circle. It dawns upon one's understanding as the horizon of one's understanding expands. Therefore the Sufis consider that it is revealed to one when one has found freedom from opinion. 

From the moment that we realize to what extent our assessment of reality is distorted by referring everything to our notion of ourselves, we appreciate our ability to look at things in reverse. For example, "I am seen" rather than "I see", or "I am thought of" instead of "I think", or "I am the convergence of an infinite and eternal reality", instead of "I experience reality". 

What is the criterion distinguishing this intuitive mode of cognizance and opinion based upon belief? One would need to investigate the levels of thinking of the human mind. 

At the bottom line: experience of the physical environment imputed through the senses and hearsay, opinion, psychological data are interpreted from the limited vantage point of our commonplace consciousness. At a higher level, our minds project their grasp of reality which our consciousness cannot encompass into metaphors. This is why mystics express their conviction in the splendor behind real-life in terms of poetry. To value what comes through in the experience of the world, one needs to tap one's inborn sense of beauty and meaningfulness. 

This virtual sense is 'revealed' if one does not limit one's opinion to the way things look from the vantage point of consciousness focalized by our commonplace notion of 'Iness" nor to opinions borrowed from others. According to the Sufi Niffari, one is suspended on the threshold until one is ready for that revelation which he calls the divine revelation. For how could the mind transcend the concept of divine transcendence by striving to carry experience to the edge of the unknowable while still confined to his/her sense of Iness? Rather it can only be revealed thanks to the significcacio passiva (being passive to the divine operation). By trying to define God, one confines God to the narrowness of one's mind, however expanded. Therefore let us not limit God by seeing in this a proof of God's reality. 

This is revelation: the meaningfulness of the universe as a total being erupts in each fraction of that being when that fraction reaches out beyond its horizon and plugs into the thinking of the universe. Here lies the next phase in human evolution. Evolution advances by dint of the revolution in our minds and a harmonious resolution.


 (Page 53) 
Epilogue: Future Spirituality 

In a large number of human activities the know-how must be continually updated. Meditation also needs to be updated. Armed with the information in the enormous pool of published material available in our day, we are now able to make a comprehensive study of the methods of meditation taught in the classical schools. By taking this opportunity to compare all these methods, we can gain a whole new grasp of the core issues facing our pioneering meditating predecessors. This in turn will help us to look ahead, and to brainstorm perspectives on the future of meditation at the scale of present-day thinking. 

Since the challenges of our times are, in some ways, more demanding than those faced by our predecessors, our free-wheeling into the future must integrate a greater complexity. For example, we will need to take into consideration futuristic views in physics (some of which have not yet gained acceptance in the party-line of physics), or the latest developments in psychology. Meditation needs to give us the means to reduce stress, improve decison-making, overcome resentment and overcome poor self-image. We need in meditation to honor our concerns about the environment, the population explosion, crime, and political oppression. We need to gain insight into the disenchantment about institutionalization, particularly in the field of spirituality, and join the nascent trend to explore new expressions of our need for the sacred, emancipated from hackneyed forms of sanctimoniousness, prescriptions, dogmatism, and superstitions.

Thanks to the momentous advances in communication (the media, technology, education, and the new paradigms), our way of considering the cosmos, and the planet Earth in particular, has taken a quantum leap. Instead of looking at the stars as viewed from planet Earth, we are now able to imagine how planet Earth looks as viewed from the stars. Looking at those photos of the Earth from outer space is almost like having been out there personally. This has surreptitiously revolutionized our way of considering our Planet, which in turn revolutionizes our way of seeing ourselves. We imagine outer space to be "out there", but has it ever occurred to you that actually planet Earth is in outer space? It all depends on how you look at it. This progressive vantage point is bound to open up new vistas in our meditation practices. 

Consequently, for example, instead of sitting still in meditation, simply observing the body or mind (which is tantamount to observing a mere cross-section of reality), we can see the whole forward march of the evolution of bodiness from our ancestors to the present state (which is like the prow), and even anticipate the future of the evolution of bodiness. Our development from our animal ancestry has not finished; it keeps advancing. The human race keeps on improving (albeit at the cost of decadence at (Page 54) the jagged ends).

Instead of aiming at escaping the "here and now" to scan transcendental levels of reality (subliminal to the existential level) as did our ancestral meditators, we will endeavor to look at the "here and now" from an overview. 
   I ask for no less than the impossible possibility: infinity in a finite fact and eternity in a temporal act.
Prentice Milford 
Even this is too commonplace. It still evidences a static view of the existential state, whereas, as we have seen, existence is only a slice of reality in its dynamic state. Therefore, we will be learning how to see how the "everywhere and always" manifests in the forward march of becoming. 

Furthermore, instead of modulating consciousness from one vantage point to another, we will need to learn to extrapolate between several vantage points. The consciousness of future humanity may well be called stereoscopic consciousness. This applies equally to the mind, which will learn to extrapolate between thinking in terms of categories and grasping the wholeness of a situation. In addition, as a corollary, we will learn to avoid accounting for things merely in terms of a causal chain in time, of which they are the effect, but we will also include causal chains moving from the transcendent dimension into the transient. We may even grasp the concatenation of many causal chains coming together in our time and space. As a consequence of this forward step, we will be able to meditate in movement, even dancing, which will reinforce the dynamic mode of meditation, rather than the static. 

Quite understandably, the ancients, who had not yet acquired our knowledge of matter, witnessing the decay of the body after death, considered it to be like dust returning to the earth. Since we can now see our live cells in powerful microscopes, our whole perception of the fabric of our body has undergone a dramatic change. Instead of dismissing our bodies as other than ourselves, we are beginning to honor the involvement of our innate sense of meaningfulness with the very fabric of our bodiness. We are intrigued by the manner in which these two sides of the same coin interact and modify each other reciprocally. It is not just mind over body, but body over mind as well. 
This is different from psychosomatic, because with psychosomatic you say that mind affects matter as if they were two different substances...any change of meaning is a change of soma, and any change of soma is a change of meaning.
Dr. David Bohm  (Page 55) 
Consequently, we need to brainstorm a new method of meditation that incorporates the earlier methods and carries them into the future.

To extricate ourselves from the rut in which we may have inadvertently stranded ourselves by taking things for granted, or from the stalemate which we may well have maneuvered ourselves into owing to a faulty strategy in the game of life, we need to rethink our lives. 

To achieve this, we need to hoist our vantage point from the commonplace narrow range of the immediate environment and look at things in a wider context. This is where some of the skills of meditation can prove helpful. It is somewhat like witnessing how different a familiar landscape looks when flying over it in a helicopter or suspended from a hang-glider. Doing this, we realize that our assessments of our life-situations change with the altitude as it were, and furthermore that they are a function of our values which manifest the higher levels of our being- and monitor our motivations. Moreover we realize that our sense of personal inadequacy or our pessimistic judgement in our assessment of a situation were due to our mind's having gotten entrapped in a way of thinking from which we failed to see a way out. Yes, one can get trapped in one's thinking and ascribe the prison to one's fate. The bind is in the mind.

To escape from this prison takes two things: a flash of insight and resolve. How do we trigger off the flash of insight? We need to first ask ourselves: what if my assessment of my life situations, (or of people around me), upon which I have relied all this time and which I have always taken for granted, is wrong? What is more, if this is true, any new assessment we might convince ourselves of at this point stands an equal chance of proving later to be erroneous. If we therefore forego not only previous assessments, but any attempt at a reassessment, then, faced with the collapse of our opinion, we find ourselves hopelessly groping our way in the dark night of understanding. Bereft of any crutches, a different mode of understanding dawns upon us. Imagine that, walking in pitch dark, suddenly you are able to see the auras of people and that the features of their real countenance are revealed to you in contrast with the features of their faces. 

It takes courage to let go of all that one has built up over the years without any guarantee that a new light will dawn upon one's horizon. But we find ourselves sometimes confronted with the choice between situations which progress gradually like a bud unfurls, or where things remain at a stand-still or run the chance of reversing into decay, or where nature proceeds by leaps and bounds. There are situations which one cannot change in their outer circumstances, but will change by one's changing oneself or by a new way of handling them. In exceptional cases - perhaps the most meaningful - there is no slow transition from one perspective to the other, the transit is sudden. Here lies the difference between the moment of time where there is an overlap between past and future and the instant where there is a sudden and irreversible break of continuity.
 (Page 56) 
These rare conditions called singularities in astro-physics occur in our lives and in our thinking. They may be illustrated by a sunrise or sunset, or solar or lunar eclipse, or the equinoxes or solstices where there is an alignment in space between two luminaries at a given time called a syzygy. Let us bear in mind that the coincidence is only meaningful from our vantage point, therefore relates the objective world to our subjective dimension.

A particularly rare coincidence between two numbers, illustrated in mathematics by an algorithm, illustrates our mind's ability to grasp coherence of a sudden where two mental constructs seemed previously to be irreconcilable. More generally what we mean by our sense of meaningfulness is our mind's ability to click when it grasps a correspondence between two thoughts which had hitherto appeared unrelated. The grasp of congruence sparks our being with delight because it gives us a sense of thinking in sync with the thinking of the universe and feeling in resonance with the emotion of the cosmos, and hence makes us aware of our holistic connectiveness with the totality which we call God, not just at the physical level but at all levels.

C. G. Jung spent much ponderous enquiry upon this paradoxical conjunction between our psyche and the physical world. In paradoxical cases, rather than it be a perception or an event that impacts our psyche and gets processed by our psyche, it is our psyche that triggers off the event. He called it synchronicity. Jung defines these rare and surprising cases that one would normally explain away as situations which cannot be causally determined as:  The simultaneous occurrence of two meaningful but not causally connected events. 

Yet he still strived to grasp the mystery behind occurrences that could not be connected in a chronological sequence where one occurrence could have triggered off the other; rather they seemed to be causally connected in a network irrespective of the arrow of time. The connections of events may in certain circumstances be other than causal and requires another principle of explanation. 

Then it occurred to him that rare events (like a szyzgy or singularity) cannot be governed by the same laws that apply to statistics, for example. Indeed the conjunctions that take place in an instant of time are rare events as compared with the gradual transformations where at each moment, the past overlaps with the future.      (Page 57) 
Probability theory is able to predict with uncanny precision the overall outcome of processes made up out of a large number of individual happenings, each in itself is unpredictable. 
Arthur Koestler 
Of course, granted that our minds can affect our body functions: 
You see the deep changes of meaning is a change in the deep material structure of the brain; we already know that certain meanings can greatly disturb the brain, but other meanings may organize it in a new way. 
David Bohm 
But how does a grasp of meaning affect the outer physical world? (Incidentally this is what it meant by psycho-kinesis). 

After years of painstaking research in psycho-kinesis, Dr. J.B. Rhine arrived at conclusions that throw some light on the problem. For Rhine, space and time are dependent upon psychic conditions and therefore can be reduced to almost a vanishing point. 

A parallel with David Bohm is called for here: 
But there is still a mental pole at every level of matter...and eventually if you go to infinite depths of matter, we may reach something very close to what you reach in the depth of the mind. 
David Bohm 
We are touching upon a most important point: space-time is only meaningful regarding physical reality. Indeed for the psyche, space is only meaningful where one is recalling physical occurrences or the functions of the mind creatively in the act of imagination. Yoga distinguishes where the mind adopts as it were the form of that which is perceived or reminisced (Nirvetarka), from the state where the mind absorbs the quintessence of the perceived irrespective of form (Nirvecara), and at some point the mind loses notions of space altogether (Asmita) and a further point at which the mind loses the sense of time (Asamprajnata Samadhi). 

For Speiser, at a certain level of our thinking, our psyche touches upon a level prior to causality. (Page 58) 
 It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the pre-conditioning of law, the chance substrate upon which law is built. 
Andreas Speiser
Compare with Bohm: 
 The mind has two-dimensional and three-dimensional modes of operation. It may be able to operate directly in the depths of the implicate order where this timeless state is the primary actuality. Then we could see the ordinary actuality as a secondary structure. 

Indeed our commonplace understanding of causality is based upon our concept of time as being uni-dimensional: the event that we infer having been causated by another one, followed it in a sequential order. In our ordinary thinking, we also assume that an event causes another if they are related in space either by electro-magnetic forces that extend in space or gravity that also extends in space (including the strong and weak forces between sub-atomic particles) . But modern physics questions the mechanistic theories of their predecessors, replacing them with acausal, non-local laws.If everything in the cosmos is connected with everything else as in the holistic paradigm, then location in space is irrelevant in the determination of events: it is simply easier for our minds to see the connection between the motion of a billiard ball and that of the one it has hit, then to see how the surge of a wave we think is in the Pacific could influence that of a wave which we think is in the English channel. Yet, as Dr. David Bohm points out, a wave in the ocean is not caused by the previous one, but each wave is introjected back into the whole ocean and it is the whole ocean that projects itself in the next wave.

A form emerges or is creatively projected from the whole , then it influences the whole, or is injected back into it; in the implicate order, it resonates with similar forms and then is projected back into the explicate order.

However, long before the holistic paradigm envisioned by General Smuts revolutionized science, the Sufis saw the insufficiency in reducing causality to the dimension of time which we call the process of becoming. One needs to account for at least another dimension of time moving from transcendence to transiency and vice-versa.

The Sufi Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi felt that beyond the sidereal empyrean, other universes would be found in a hierarchical sequence of spheres of light of increasing subtlety. The higher ones precede the lower ones and enjoy a hiearchically higher value (precellence) and consequently sovereignty (prevalence); the lower ones proceed from the higher ones in a causal order in a different (Page 59) time order than the commonplace arrow of time - a kind of exponential order. This so called vertical hierarchy which he refers to as the 'world of mothers' then splits up in a lateral order where equality takes over from dominance. Here we find the prototypes of the species. It is at this level that our ordinary notions of the process of time take effect.

But  it is in the conjunction between a physical phenomenon and a spontaneous thought that was not triggered off by an actual occurrence that our delight reaches a degree of intensity such that it could spark our creative faculties - whether of a work of art or of our personality. One could define creativity as the act of exploring unchartered regions of the mind while grasping a correspondence between the mental constructs thus gleaned and a form or configurations or scenarios in the fabric of matter. Creativity is a congruent conjunction between the timeless and the transient, the heavenly and the earthly.  
We could say that our action toward the whole universe is a result of what it means to us. ..In the long run only those meanings that allow changes that tend to bring about accord between us and the rest of the universe will be possible. 
David Bohm
 
We shall sooner or later have to give up many of our old habits of thought and adopt new ones: habits that are better adapted to life in a world that is living in the presence of the past - and is also living in the presence of the future, and open to continuing creation.
 Rupert Sheldrake 
PRACTICES:

What would be the kind of meditations embodying the progress in our thinking in our day and age and oriented towards the future? Having learnt how the mind works when it awakens beyond the existential realm, we need to learn to awaken in life - grasping our place, our role in the universe.

Let us follow retrospectively the trails of the two evolutionary networks that have intermeshed into the formation of our being as it is at present: (i) the legacy of our celestial origination, (ii) our genetic inheritance. To do this we need to reverse in our mind the forward thrust of the arrow of time and carry our memory right back in time - into prehistorical aeons of time whose traces are stored (though recessively) in deep memory in the archives of the depths of the unconscious zones of our psyche. 

 (Page 60) 
1)     Bear in mind that the fabric of your body originated in the big-bang explosion at the onset of the present aeon in the genesis of the universe - there were however previous universes! Ponder upon the fact that your body is made out of the fabric of the stars.

2)    Try to imagine what it would feel like to be a vibration - more precisely a high-frequency vibration of pure energy.

3)    Imagine that this pristine state in which you were gels into a crystal.

4)    Can you visualize the marvelous symmetry of lattice-work of the molecules and within them the atoms of your crystalline primeval body jiggling and sparkling?

5)    Can you envision the glee of the electrons within the atoms as they avail themselves of the energy of ambient light to free themselves, even if for a split second, from the rigor of the constraint of the order of the universe maintaining them in their orbitals, and dance with abandon. Imagine the outburst of joy at participating with some measure of freedom in the choreography of the cosmos!

6)    Now imagine the sudden evolutionary leap of the molecules constituting your body from the mineral state to the plant - from the inorganic to the organic. Envision the intelligence of the universe self-organizing itself in an improved fashion through the awareness now emerging in the molecules, finding a way of grouping gregariously with their neighbors to cooperate by specializing in their mutual contributions to the living cell. To illustrate this: instead of the repetitive series of frescoes on a wall paper, we have a flurry of proliferating forms and radiant colors.

7)    Can you see the way the crystal connects with light after being entombed in the earth? Now experience the plant's ability to power its cyclic unfoldment, and more so: its mutations by dint of light. Can you envision yourself as a flower at night fluttering in resonance with the trembling of a star? Can you feel the thrust of the evolutionary drive striving to free the plant of its roots that it may explore neighboring space as an animal whose instincts still conspire in us.

8)    Or is it the impact of our heavenly legacy that seeks freedom from the strict conditioning in the more primitive developmental stages of our being and makes for ever more variable structures in the material underpinning of our being? Notice that simply thinking of the celestial spheres conveys to you a sense of freedom. Now you may feel somehow the connection between your body as it has evolved from its precursors and your heavenly legacy.
 (Page 61) 
9)    At this stage, we are ready to understand the implications of the alchemical betrothal. Recollecting the two main genealogical streams generating your being, the celestial and the genetic, try and see how they have been intermeshing in both your body and your personality. If you recall some of the practices we did, envisioning our celestial bodies, fashioning them in accord with our thoughts and attunements and creative imagination, and observing how this affected our countenance and even our demeanor, you will have established that connection. The same applies to our personality. 

10)   In meditative vein, envision yourself descending through the spheres. Now guage the need you felt through your descent to understand how the intention governing the software of the universe gets actuated on earth. Now realize that it was this very need to understand that you felt throughout that impelled the mutations in the very fabric of your body as it progressed though your precursors in the course of evolution that enable your present body to be better able to serve the intelligence of which it is the support system.

11)   Now consider that, while you converge the universe and therefore incur a great measure of conditioning, you also act upon the universe. See how your incentive exercises an impact upon the legacy of the past in your body and personality which we have been recollecting.

12)   Bearing in mind that the human condition is just a developmental stage in the evolutionary march, can you sense in yourself a longing to awaken beyond the human condition? Can you feel the evolutionary drive spurring you on? Can you see that if the initial spring-head behind the whole evolutionary drive is the very freedom that resonates with your pristine celestial nature, then the Cosmos envisioned as one being (which is what is meant by God) tends to converge in each being . This is incidentally the holistic model. If this is so , then the more we converge of the bounty of the universe, the more self-sufficient we become. Think of yourself as aiming at becoming gradually a spin-off in which the universe rethinks and reconstructs itself.

13)   Instead of visualizing the stars as they may appear from Planet Earth, now reach out there and imagine them as supporting civilizations different from ours and how our civilization might look from the vantage point of their intelligence.

14)   Now if you ponder upon how the mind of the crystal evolved into the mind of a plant, then of an animal, then reached the human stage, realize that you can stretch your mind beyond its limits. The clue to spurring our mind to surpass itself is by jettisoning a lot of pre-conceived ideas - which is precisely what we have learned in this course. There could be no limits to this, but if indeed our minds are holistically sub-wholes of the mind of the cosmos, and if indeed the smaller the fraction of the holograph, the less well it reflects the original (Page 62) object, then the more we stretch out minds, the more truly our thinking will prove isomorphic with the thinking of the cosmos! Think: we are decoding the code of the universe!

15)   However we should not limit our thinking to its cosmic dimension (its ability to extrapolate between more and more factors); we could highlight transcendental dimension. As we shift our sense of identity from plane to plane we discover different levels of thinking. We normally ascribe the notions acquired by our thinking at higher levels to our sense of values. Values such as compassion, humor, authenticity actuate themselves increasingly as evolution marches on.
16)   Starting with your spontaneous thoughts however random, prompted by inspiring emotions, try to grasp the archetypes of which these thoughts are the exemplars. You will find yourself exploring a whole different dimension - the world of metaphor. Now if you turn your mind as it were downwards, you will find that these thoughts self-organize themselves as forms, or landscapes, or scenarios, in your dreams.

17)   Now we arrive at a kind of pinnacle of cosmic cogniSee yourself in the universe, your origination, your purpose, your destiny, your past and future, your ability to shift your focus through the spheres by adjusting your attunement.

18)   At this point we grasp the antimony between thought and emotion as the two sides of the same coin, and permutate between them. Consequently we can trace our origination to the emotion behind the universe beyond the software. Just like the way that the emotion moving the cosmos, (the emotion behind the universe that manifested as the universe) passing though J. S. Bach's soul was crystalized into the notes of his music, you can feel the emotion spurring the universe at the cosmic scale configurating itself in the idiosyncrasies of your personality and the countenance of your face behind its external features.

19)   You could willfully reinforce these emotions by indulging in the musings of your soul, by enjoying your sense of bewonderment at the marvel of yourself and the universe of which you are a part, and giving vent to your need for glorification. Lo and behold, what at first seemed to be your personal emotion - rapture - culminates into impersonal, cosmic emotion - divine ecstasy 

20)  Now honor your intuition that behind all manifestation there is great splendor and that you are born of the divine nostalgia to manifest that splendor in every possible way in and through your being at all levels. Accept the divinity of your being. Awaken to the divinity of your being. Accept the beauty of your being if you can reconcile it with a sense of modesty, as long as you do not confuse it with false humility. Priding oneself in one's self denigration avers itself to (Page 63) be a failure to recognize one's divine heritage, and proves self-defeating. The Sufis consider this to be an insult to the divine Artist.
 
21)   We have been exploring methods of meditation whereby we may actuate the splendor of our divine investiture thanks to the ability of our intelligence to surpass its previous outreach, and by discovering in our high attunement, deeply rooted in the very spring-heads of our being, the divine nostalgia in search of beauty and love. Eventually we understand the enormous implications of a saying of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, my father, embodying the very quintessence of the metaphysical traditions of the Sufis and representing the spiritual paradigm for the future:
Awakening consists in seeing oneself as the fulfillment of the divine purpose and recognizing that purpose in the universe at large. 


  
Working with the Ego

by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

First Edition, August 1996
Second Edition, July 1997 

The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in March 1996 at Wimberly, Texas;  Madison, Wisconsin; and the Abode of the Message, New Lebanon, New York. The chapter "Games of the Ego" was previously published as Keeping in Touch number 99.
Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner.
There is One Path, the annihilation of the false ego in the real, which raises the mortal to immortality, in which resides all perfection.
Hazrat Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Prologue
 (Page 1) 

 The Divine Point of View 


When we meditate, and our desire is to attain illumination, we must first examine our problems, because the reminiscence of our problems will keep knocking on the doors of our consciousness and of our conscience. We will not be able to get anywhere because that's not meditation -ruminating upon our problems -- that's cogitation. If we limit ourselves to our self-image, then our problems seem to reflect our notion of ourselves. Therefore the first step in meditation is to reconnect with the totality, and that happens by expanding consciousness.

The first step is exemplified in the first movement of the Dhikr, where the head is turning in a circle. We think of the starry sky, and our bodies as part of the holographic unity. We are reconnecting with the ground from which we have emerged. At a further step we see our problems as part of the cosmic drama. We can no longer say, "These are my problems." Looking, for example, at Joan of Arc, we can see what happened to her was not her problems; it was her involvement in the drama of the cosmos. That drama does, I must admit, involve suffering.

Why should that be? Why can't we just be happy? I would answer that in the fragmentation of the total being, each fragment is endowed with that most essential of all qualities of the total being -free will. The consequence is that when we identify with our fragmented selves we are alienated from the Divine will. That was the message of Christ, and what we are doing is reconnecting.

If we just look at things from our point of view, then we are caught up in a limited perspective. Our consciousness acts like a pinpoint, a vantage point. Of course the amount of our understanding does (hopefully) increase as we evolve, but it's still only our understanding. We can see the relationship between this localized vantage point and our notion of ourselves, our self-image. We can see that we think of ourselves as individual persons, and the consequence is that we are going to react to the bad situations, assaults upon our persons, by developing a kind of ego power. We don't know how to do otherwise. We are drawn into our ego identity, which means discarding the main experience of our being, the range of our being which includes the universe. That is ultimately what we mean by God.

When we do Sufi practices we need to bear in mind the antinomy between these two poles: the personal vantage point, and the Divine vantage point that we do not know but which is revealing itself to us. The Divine vantage point cannot be the object of our cognizance. What we do from our personal point of view seems to be active, whereas we are responsive to the Divine revelation. So it's both at the same time. Our response enables us to espy the meaningfulness that is coming through the revelation. Gradually we learn to shift our consciousness from our limited point of view into the divine consciousness. That's the end of the process. At first it doesn't seen possible; it seems like presumption on our part.

These perspectives are, to a large extent, triggered by our emotional attunement; we really can't do it with our will. While we do the Dhikr we first look at how we are involved (Page 2) with people in situations, but at a further stage we experience our involvement in the drama of the universe. We begin by learning how to get into the consciousness of people who are involved in our problems. Then, having developed this skill, we begin to include more and more people until we arrive at that state articulated by Francis of Assisi as "The cosmos is looking at me." As I am involved in the problem, the cosmos is looking at that problem through me.
.  (Page 3) 
 Games of the Ego 

Let us peer into the basics of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's teaching regarding the games of the ego. The primary process upon which Pir-o-Murshid bases the training of mureeds revolves around his adage, "Make God a reality, so that God is no more just a belief or concept." To make God a reality, one needs to "awaken the God within." It is realistic, rather than being based on a belief system -- God transcendent. It means discovering and identifying with the holistic dimensions of our being, which Murshid calls our divine inheritance, rather than limiting ourselves within the constraint of our commonplace self-image.

Somehow to validate ourselves against self-doubt we, maybe unconsciously, resort to a deceptive strategy; being defensive may lead to being sanctimonious, prepossessive, overbearing, self-righteous, or arrogant. This is a very dangerous syndrome often found amongst people dedicated to a high ideal or purporting to be "spiritual," who incur the risk of stumbling between the horns of a dilemma: the ideal versus reality. This leads to incongruity, inconsistency, ambiguity; a mismatch in our self-image between parading make-believe self-validation while floundering in the abyss of self-denigration.

Therefore, the first step is muhasibi, matching our motivations with our objectives, and our objectives with our values. We ask ourselves why we are doing this or the other thing and what are our motivations in our relationship with another person. Somehow our attitude towards people, and consequently our way of handling people and situations, is a function of our own self-image which is ordinarily deceptive. This self-image is commonly a device used, probably unconsciously, to protect ourselves against the onslaught upon our self-esteem by others. It is a built-in strategy which proves ultimately counterproductive because it does not enlist all our resources. In our ignorance of the bountiful qualities of our real being, we resort to a perfunctory strategy!

Investigate whether you are resorting to this strategy. Are you parading an imaginary self-image to protect your vulnerability? If so, you may detect the same strategy in others. This representation of what is really one aspect of our real being, with which one identifies, is precisely what Pir-o-Murshid calls 'the false ego'. Murshid defines the 'false ego' as a faulty self-image. Our faulty self-image avers itself to be an inadequate and misleading support upon which to establish our identity, and its consequent effect upon our handling of our problems may have disastrous consequences. It is a fraction of our being with which we identify, whereby we are not enlisting all our potentialities. The crucial issue is therefore unmasking the hoax of what Pir-o-Murshid calls 'the false ego'.
The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. It is not that the false ego is our ego, and the true ego is the ego of God, it is that the true ego which is the ego of God has been reduced to a false ego in us.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  (Page 4) 
Our defense system may in extreme cases, be blown up to the extent of parading a puffed up masquerade of selfish disposition, oppressing and down-treading kindred beings, who themselves nurture an inferiority complex, or at least a poor self-image, and do not have the gall, the impudence, perhaps even the impertinence or the ruthless heartlessness to counter this assault on their vulnerable self-esteem. Since by deceiving themselves, they fool others, maybe unawares, the less discerning may submit to their patronizing impact.

This is how this false notion of ourselves may develop: In our youthful, trusting naivete, we believe in our projections of ideal values to which we pledge allegiance. Soon we get hurt, wounded, disenchanted, rejected, disenfranchised. The need to provide protection against further assaults upon our vulnerability becomes imminent, urgent, imperative, compelling! What are the resources which promise to provide us with a shield? Where can we find a healing? Outside, in friendly, compassionate, reliable support from the brigade of dedicated helpers and counselors? Or inside, in our in-built self-healing propensity? Our self-esteem, our self-confidence, our ability to make our way in life is at stake!

Our programming equips us with several strategies. The perfunctory one (the commonest) is simplistically reactionary and fraught with rudimentary emotions. If we can detect these strategies in ourselves, then we can earmark them in others:

1. If abused or humiliated: anger, resentment that can exasperate into hatred with the ensuing cruelty.

2. If oppressed or repressed by a despotic or tyrannical ego: either aggression, spite, or resentment for having to yield, thereby losing our self-respect.

3. In our endeavor to validate ourselves by vying in valor or emulation, feelings of envy or jealousy may be aroused.

4. If we ground our self-esteem on our vying with the Jones's in our possessions, covetousness and greed may ensue. (A curious trick of the ego is that the egoist sees in every other person a pronounced ego. "Why has he got a higher rank than me?")

If there has been a pattern of being punished or disadvantaged by having owned up, or stood for what one believes, or simply being up-front: a tendency toward being devious, cowardly, or manipulative may ensue.

All these reactions (and probably many more) evidence our rather perfunctory and therefore inadequate efforts in dealing with the challenge to our being accruing from the psychological environment. They may present themselves as a shield, a dressing, a parade, or a masque concealing or camouflaging our real being. The consequence of their effect upon our self-image is confusing, contradictory, ambiguous, incongruous. It could work both ways: it can bloat one's ego to the point of making one megalomaniacal, judgmental and contemptuous, or on the other hand self-defeating and demeaning. It can lead toward sanctimoniousness or toward false modesty.
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This ego feels vain when it says: "I cannot bear it. I am better than the others." And so one's weakness is presented as strength.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Failure to reconnoiter these features in our personality as strategies obstructs our discovery of our true identity, which would help in our overcoming or transmuting them. On the other hand, to remove these protective displays, or crutches would trigger off dangerous withdrawal symptoms: otherworldliness, helplessness, listlessness. Yet, they aver themselves to be counterproductive in the long range.

Since they are reactive, defensive, and therefore only engage a small, peripheral area of our psyche, to forestall the withdrawal symptoms that one would trigger off by removing them, it is advisable to replace them gradually by enlisting the rich gamut of resourcefulness latent in our various inheritances. Removing them with the kind of will that we develop when identifying solely with this area of our psyche, which Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false ego," can only cause conflicts and result in a split in our personality. No doubt by failing to recognize and own features in our personality like guilt, resentment, anger, jealousy, covetousness, they would simply conceal themselves in the unconscious and erupt uncontrollably or make us feel mortified and frustrated. However, if we become aware of the way the universe conflues in us (as the ocean in a wave), which is what Pir-o-Murshid means by God consciousness, then we would muster a transpersonal will, which is what is meant by the Divine will that supersedes the limited, egoistical personal will. This could be illustrated by plugging a battery into the charger.

Furthermore, it is in the nature of life that life is continually self-organizing itself as us, and to achieve this we are concomitantly dissolving at the jagged ends. This could be illustrated by a flower. For the fresh petals in the center to unfurl, the jagged ones at the periphery need to fall apart. One does not have to chase them away; they will disintegrate to give way to the new dispensation.

Besides, Pir-o-Murshid presents an original concept of the will, which he illustrates by the yacht's captain harnessing the wind but directing its momentum in the direction s/he wishes to steer the yacht. One could represent the wind as the self-organizing faculty written into the programming of the universe and our will in availing ourselves of this force, yet bending it according to our personal initiative (which is what we mean by our will). In this case we clearly are not talking about the will of a fraction of our being that has alienated itself from our whole self (which Pir-o-Murshid calls the false ego), because our will is a customized expression of the Divine impulse, in this illustration the wind.

More importantly, since our false ego represents only a small portion of the bounty of our being, by calling upon it to meet an undesirable onslaught upon our being, one is failing to actualize the potentialities that lie in wait in the wider range of our being, the seedbed of our personality. If instead we place a buffer between the challenge of the psychological environment and ourselves so as to discover that bountiful underpinning of our personality, that challenge will act as a catalyst rather than as an onslaught spurring those latent potentials. One tends to evaluate one's (Page 6) idiosyncrasies on the strength of one's self-image. If one discovers wider areas of one's self-image, latent idiosyncrasies will surface.

This is the reason why Pir-o-Murshid attaches so much importance to becoming aware of what he calls our divine inheritance.
The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man and this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents God Himself. The same God, so little of whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again at the end of the cycle, trying to emerge as perfectly as possible in the midst of human imperfection. The one who is conscious of his earthly origin is an earthly man; the one who is conscious of his heavenly origin is the son of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Since the ephemeral being manifests the form of the eternal, it is by the contemplation of the eternal that God communicates to us the knowledge of Himself. You know yourself through another knowledge, different from that which you had of yourself, because it is through Him that you know yourself.
Ibn'Arabi
Pir-o-Murshid points to the efficacy of meditation to downplay our false self-image and therefore overcome the counterproductive strategy of the false ego, thus mustering all our resourcefulness by discovering the bounty latent in us.

The false ego is overcome through meditating upon the true self which, in reality, is God. It takes a powerful impact, involving our being in its very substance, to bring about a change so as to shift our identity from the constraint of the commonplace self-image. This is where meditation culminates in prayer.
When they stand before God to learn, they unlearn all things that the world has taught them, when they stand before God, their ego, their self, their life, is no more before them. They do not think of themselves in that moment with any desire to be fulfilled, with any motive to be accomplished, with any expression of their own; but as empty cups, that God may fill their being, that they may lose the false self.
The beauty in this is that when man (the most egoistic being in creation, who keeps himself veiled from God, the Perfect Self within, by the veil of his imperfect self, which has formed his presumed ego) by extreme humility when he stands before God and bows and bends and prostrates himself before His Almighty Being, makes the highest point of his presumed being, the head, touch the Earth where his feet are. He (Page 7) in time washes off the black stains of the false ego, and the light of perfection gradually manifests. He stands then first face to face with his God, the idealized Deity, and when the ego is absolutely crushed, then God remains within and without, in both planes, and none exists save He.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
In that state, called Fana-fi-Allah, when the soul is absorbed in God, we lose the false sense of being and find the true reality. Then we finally experience what is termed Baqa-i-Fana, where the false ego is annihilated and merged into the true personality, which is really God expressing Himself in some wondrous ways. This is the same also as nirvana, where the true reality of life is experienced and expressed by rising above ourselves.
If this limited self which makes the false ego is broken, and one has risen above the limitations of life on all the planes of existence, the soul will break all boundaries, and will experience that freedom which is the longing of every soul.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


Part I:  The Pugmarks of the Bear

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 Divine Limitation 

Let us think of a problem, perhaps the most difficult problem in our life. To start with we're in our ordinary consciousness, and we think, "Well, these are the facts. You can tell me what you like, but these are the facts." Now as we inhale, we switch back and try to see that something, some kind of a drama, seems to be coming through that problem. That problem is just the way it appears in our ordinary consciousness. As we switch into that inner attunement we see the problem in its context. There are far-reaching implications. So the problem is like a wave in the sea; behind that wave there is a whole sea. That's one further step.

In the transfigured state, we see the aura of a flower. That would be if our vantage point is interfacing with the flower, is facing the flower. See if we can imagine that our consciousness is now in the flower, or our vantage point is within the flower, instead of our looking at the flower from a distance. We can almost see how the reality behind the flower is configuring itself into those petals. Better still, we see the harmony that is virtual in the universe, the virtual harmony of the universe. For example, the harmony of the orbits of the planets, and the stars, and the galaxies. That cosmic harmony, that mathematical relationship, is configuring the petals. We can see it from inside now, almost as if we were able to enter into the unconscious of that flower.

If we watch Notre Dame in Paris from a certain angle, or vantage point, we haven't seen Notre Dame; we've just seen Notre Dame from that angle. Imagine now that we do the same thing with our problem as we did with the flower. We really enter into that problem, so we're not looking at it from our personal vantage point. Our consciousness is homologous; it is of the same nature as the programming inside that flower, inside that problem. Our view of the problem is not limited by our vantage point. Our vantage point has gotten totally merged into the kind of meaningfulness that is coming through that problem. We see there is a measure of freedom and a measure of constraint in that problem.

The words we use have a certain range. We use a word and there is a range of meaning. If a word meant everything then there would be no language. For our words to be meaningful, there has to be both a constraint and a range of freedom. So if we enter into that problem from within, we see that for it to be meaningful, there needs to be some kind of obstacle to its being hunky dory. There has to be some kind of constraint in the problem, and that is compensated for by the meaningfulness, just like our language is enhanced by the constraint in our words.

The consequence is that things don't happen as we would like them to happen, but there is beauty in the way the meaningfulness in that problem emerges out of its very constraint. To put a label on it, we're seeing things from the Nazut point of view, then we're seeing things from the Arzvah point of view. Now we're going to see things from the Mithal point of view, seeing what impact we have on the problem, because the problem isn't just there irrespective of us. Somehow, our handling (Page 10) of the problem affects the problem. We can't just consider the problem per se, as it is. In order to test our understanding of the problem, imagine that we've changed our way of handling that problem. How would it affect the problem?

Suppose we're working with somebody we don't like and that person feels it. Suppose we were to go to that person and say, "Look, I think we need to talk because, quite honestly, there is something about you that I have a problem with. I don't want to be detrimental. I don't want to blame you for it. Maybe it's something in me. Anyway, I feel it's not good for us to go on like this. So I hope you don't mind if I just open my heart and tell you that there is something that makes my relationship with you really very difficult. It would be wonderful if we could overcome that." Of course it takes courage, because we're afraid that person will become angry and might slam the door in our face, or whatever. We're taking a risk.

I'm not saying that's what we should do. I never tell people what they should do. Suppose, however, that in our meditation we imagine we are taking a different tack in our dealing with this problem than the one we've been taking so far. How does it affect the problem? Problems are always problems of relationship, between people, or even between ourselves and matter. For example if we're a carpenter or a mechanic, there's always a relationship between us and matter. Most often, though, it's between people.

Now, we can feel, or be aware of, the idiosyncrasies of our being. For example, "I'm a rather trusting person and I get deceived." Or, "I'm a fearful person and consequently I find it difficult to involve myself or commit myself." Or, "I have a melancholic disposition and I find it difficult to be joyous." Or, "I've suffered in my childhood from owning up, and consequently I do not always tell the truth because I'm afraid of being punished." (That's a kind of education we've taught children, which develops in them a kind of deviousness.) Or, "I'm a very truthful person, candid, and the consequence is that I step on people's corns and always cause rows." And so on and so forth.

Those are examples of idiosyncrasies. Now see how these idiosyncrasies affect our problems. People perceive these things and react, or adjust themselves accordingly. For example they think, "I can't trust this person," and the consequence is they don't get a job. Or they think, "This person is insecure, so I wouldn't like to find myself in a situation in which the uncertainty of this person is going to affect my life." Or, "That's an irate person and I'm afraid of opening up, so we're not really communicating." See how our idiosyncrasies affect the problem?

Our self-image has the effect of operating a kind of sclerosis in our personality, in our idiosyncrasies, so they can't change. We identify with our idiosyncrasies, so they can't change. We've gone through our life like that, without progressing. What a waste of opportunity.

Now suppose instead of the static notion we have of our self-image, we think of it as dynamic, as progressing, as evolving. It's as though it were flowing from inside; that the new qualities, that are emerging like the fresh petals inside the flower, are (Page 11) pushing the other jaded idiosyncrasies out of the way. They're being dispersed. This is Mithal. The creativity of our being transforms our problems. It transforms our relationships with the people involved, and relationships are what the problem is about

The secret of creativity is what is called in science retrocausality, that is the effect of our vision of the future upon the present. We might call it wishful thinking, but if we imagine how we could be, then it encourages the flow of new dispositions in our being, and that will eventually transform our relationship with people. Of course there is some resistance. People have made a picture of us that was based upon the picture that we had of ourselves, and they are holding us to it. Consequently we might find that we need to talk with the person and say, "Look, we've got to sit down and talk this over because you know both of us are not what we used to be. We've changed. I'm a new person; you're a new person. I think I know how you've changed, but you know it better than I do. In the same way, perhaps you don't know how I've changed, but I think you need to know because then we can communicate much better." That is Mithal.

The setting of our consciousness we find when we are inhaling and are identified with our aura, that kind of sense of difference of our identity, is going to help us now, because our usual vision of the world is very limited. It's like what we see on the television screen, but behind it there is a tremendous array of wave and wave interference patterns. There's a change in our sense of reality. It's funny, but it's a different kind of perspective than we have when we've got our feet on the Earth.

Especially if we try to remember our childhood and even babyhood, it has a kind of impact on our consciousness that seems totally out of sync with the present. The present seems real and those impressions seem to belong not just to the past, but to another perspective. In that state we can't see details. It's like seeing the sea instead of the waves. That's what I mean by seeing things in their context. If we fly very high we can't see the trees in the forest, but we see the forest. In the same way, we see implications in our problems that we can't see when we're standing there at a close range.

Of course, there's no way of explaining it, not only to other people, but even to ourselves. Language was made to give vent to the usual perspective and not for this alternative perspective where everything seems to be intermeshed with everything else. We can toggle between the two, just like we did with the flower. We return to our personal perspective of the problem and then we move back. In fact when we move back, we're much more aware of the emotions behind the problem. We see the problem as the crystallization of the emotional forces behind it. This requires us to let go not only of our body consciousness, but also of our personality.

Consider that we have been in some way inveigled in the world, and consequently it has changed our sense of our identity; that is, we've lost our sense of our pristine identity. Now, somehow, we switch again. We switch upwards instead of backwards. We can see that by our interfacing our relationship with the existential condition, an aspect of ourselves has accrued to what we were before. What we were before has not been diminished thereby. It might have been tarnished but like the voice of Caruso it's still there.
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We notice a kind of aesthetic sensitivity. Looking at things from the vantage point of an angel, we are very sensitive to the purity of people, or the impurity, and therefore to the authenticity, or the manipulation, or the grossness, or whatever. It's a very sharpened sense of emotion that is evidenced by our choice of music, or our choice of clothing, or choice of where we make our house, and our relationship with people. It can be very beautiful. It can be commonplace; we chat together and like each other. We can look at our problem from the vantage point of an angel now, and it is as though mud had been cast on the snow.

That is a more perfunctory way of looking at it, the Mass being celebrated in a concentration camp. Our soul is pained to see the sacrilege that we get into in the problem. We remember that the purpose doesn't justify the means. People take up a cause, a just cause, like a knight. For example, we were fighting the Nazis. Then the very people who are fighting for the cause slip into the same things they are fighting against. I remember in the war, there were Germans struggling in the burning water. There were flames around them, and they were hoping we would rescue them, but the captain refused to rescue them. That's the kind of thing I mean. We commit ourselves to a cause and make ourselves believe we're following that cause, but then we use means that contradict our cause, that defeat it in fact.

That's looking at things from the vantage point of the angel. The only weapon of the angel is a sort of light. That means bringing those situations that are murky and covered up into the open. Then the forces of evil tend to disperse like Bald Mountain at the pinching of dawn. We could say it is the understanding of the heart, which is what the Sufis are talking about, instead of the understanding of the mind. Our judgment of a person is the result of the sensitivity of our heart, how our heart feels meeting a person. If we're sensitive and that person is beautiful, I don't mean physically beautiful, but a beautiful soul, our heart is shattered. We feel like crying with joy. The discovery of beauty is the most shattering, and overwhelming, and also transforming experience.

This kind of perspective is enhanced if we are able to earmark the angelic counterpart of our being, which is interspersed with the subtle body and the physical body. We mustn't think it's up there somewhere in the heavens. It's right here. It's not quite like the aura. It has some kind of structure but it's not a physical structure. It's an eternal face, probably what is meant in the Qur'an by, "Everywhere is the face of God." It's not the physical face. It's something intangible.

Now we make that quantum leap into the Jabarut stage. We have to pass through that place where everything is assessed according to our sensitivity, to access a whole different way of thinking. We remember the rishi who had such a problem trying to understand the man who was asking him a question. His was a totally different way of seeing. We are seeing not just, as we did before, what are the issues active in the problem. Were seeing the programming. It's as though there is some kind of veil now separating where we are from where we used to be judging our problem. We've passed that threshold, so we can't judge our problems the same way any more.
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In fact, we realize it's totally off; our judgment about the problem is totally off. We're conscious of action beyond the dichotomy of subject/object. Pir-o-Murshid calls it "grasping the mechanism behind the Universe," and even talks about a finer machine behind the grosser machine. Maybe the finer machine is like the computer behind the machine tools in a factory.

The secret to this is to get into our subtle body, the electromagnetic field, and then particularly the aura, the light as an electromagnetic phenomena. The secret is what we call sound rather than light. I say what we call sound, because that's the way our ears, and of course our brains, perceive vibration. We call it sound, but it's really vibration. It's a code that we are called upon to decipher. The body of the human being from a certain angle is a code. The DNA is a code. That brings us to what Pythagoras called the symphony of the spheres, which the Sufis call a language, the language of God, because meaningfulness is articulated though vibrations. The enormous, infinite range of frequencies provides intelligence with a language.

Our body is the result of our DNA. Likewise our problems are the expression of that symphony of frequencies. It's like a melody in that symphony. Each melody implies every other melody in the symphony.

Now our problem looks very different. We're seeing some relationship between top and bottom that gives us a sense of what we mean by the tenuities between the archetypes and exemplars. It just takes one further step to see the code is exactly that marvelous composition of archetypes, what we call sifat or qualities, which are then enacted in our problems.

We can use these tenuities; we can toggle between the two perspectives all the time, between the exemplar and the archetype, and then between the archetype and the exemplar. We always see our problems from the qualities that are enacted. That is the reason for the practice of the wazifa, establishing or reestablishing that connection.

Up to the present we were interested in the world of multiplicity. Now imagine we're in a very high state in retreat, and we're walking in the street. Normally when we're walking in the street, we see a lot of people rushing about, like ants. Now somehow they seem like the cells of one body. We are beginning to grasp the unity behind multiplicity. Finally we've gone as far as we can go now, to the point of the metaphor. "If you see the waves, you can't see the sea." We grasp the reality of the aphorisms. "'If you see an object, it has escaped you." "Knowledge is a veil upon the known." "How much more important the knower than the known." That's God consciousness. Are we so puny as to get upset about our problems, when we're invited to the Divine banquet?
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 Three Questions 

Do you think the cosmos -- that does not only mean the physical world but all levels of reality -- is endowed with overall consciousness, or do you think we are the only ones who can have a consciousness? I ask that question because I myself am positive that the cosmos, the universe, has an overall consciousness and that's what we mean by God consciousness. If we say God consciousness, however, we must know what we're saying. We say a lot of things we don't know.

A further question is: Do you think the cosmos gains something by the knowledge we have of it? We are gradually trying to understand the cosmos a little more. In the time of Buddha, people thought the stars were just decorations in the sky. There was no notion of a planet as a planet. They didn't know what was beyond the horizon; they'd just go there and see that the horizon had moved. There was no sense of the planet as a reality, no sense of the solar system nor of the galaxy. Since that time we have gained a kind of knowledge, albeit very limited, for understanding the cosmos. Just imagine that the physical cosmos has fashioned, in the course of aeons of time, the brain that enables us to know it. The cosmos is knowing itself through us. That's Sufism, that God knows Him/Herself eternally in the principles of His/Her being, but there is a further mode of knowledge that is acquired through us, or through God becoming us, or God as us.

The third question is: Do you think we gain knowledge thanks to the knowledge the cosmos has of us? That's a little more difficult, but if we can grasp the first two propositions we can perhaps reach a third one. We call that mirroring. Sufism is based upon mirroring. If you use the word God instead of the cosmos then you understand the words of Ibn Arabi when he says that God discovers a further aspect of His/Her being by discovering Him/Herself in us, or as us, or through us.

We don't know that. We project an ideal of what we think is God, and if we're intelligent we realize it's just a projection. If we're a little more intelligent, we realize by trying to imagine what God could be like, we ascribe to or project upon Him/Her the most excellent qualities in ourselves. We are also able to transpose the notion that we possess these qualities by imagining how they could be if they were perfect. For example, we have not just compassion in us, but Divine compassion. We have this faculty, and it's perhaps the key, illustrated by the words of Poincaire, a French mathematician who said, "The notion of infinity in mathematics has its ground in the faculty of the human being always to imagine a larger number than has been imagined so far."

If we translate this in terms of qualities, we see that while we have some compassion in us, somehow, by extra pulling, we are able to imagine what infinite compassion would be like. We have some mastery, but we imagine what the most limitless mastery could be like. Of course, we never reach it; it's in infinite regress, like the horizon. Still, that faculty lifts us from our personal self-image into the model of which our self-image is the exemplar, the archetype. When we are using words consciously we are able to imply the archetypal meaning. When we say "my compassion," then (Page 15) it's limited, but when we say "Compassion," then we're not talking about limited expression of compassion but somehow we're implying an infinite compassion.

That's what we mean by sifat, the qualities we ascribe to God. What we are doing with the wazifa of the Sufis is giving vent to a quality. We choose a quality, but the quality is a clue leading us to reach beyond our limited, finite mind to exercise higher faculties, lifting us beyond our limitations, rescuing us from the limitation which is the cause of all our troubles That's what we're trying to do in meditation.

In prayer we prostrate ourselves. We bow our head to the ground. Of course that is not done today in modem civilization; we might spoil our trousers by kneeling. The experience of that, however, just does something beyond what I could ever say. It is an act of utter humility, not humiliation, facing the overwhelming greatness that we ascribe to God. That is a way of weakening at least that aspect of our self-image that we could call the ego, and that is intolerant of others, so that it is replaced by love and compassion. This is a role of prayer, and you find among the Orthodox, that people bow right down to the ground. If you make a retreat such as I made at Mount Athos, that's the way to do it. It's easier if you're in your cell and alone and not exposed to other people.

Sitting cross-legged will lead to samadhi. It gives us a sort of balance so we won't topple over if we're not conscious of our bodies. Kneeling, on the other hand, is a way of expressing in our bodiness, our interfacing with the Divine presence, so it has a very different effect upon us. For a very strong ego it's very difficult to bow. The Hindus tell you to bow before the guru, but for the Sufis the only being one bows to is God.

This has the effect of transmuting what we call our false ego, the image we make of ourselves as an individual will, and connecting with the totality of which we are a part, rather than seeking to become a superman or superwoman. In Hinduism, the rishi is seen as a kind of Olympic hero who has overcome the world. I used to be very impressed with this when I was young, but now I see some very high-falutin' self-assertiveness in it. We can realize, instead, the beauty of the humility of Christ washing the feet of his disciples. He doesn't sit on a throne, but is involved in life, and loving his involvement in life. If we allow our meditation to reflect that attitude instead of trying to achieve something for ourselves it will transform us, but we're not doing it to try to get transformed.

The kind of emotions that are aroused by taking this attitude are going to make all the difference in our meditation. Now we're not just encapsulated in the perspective of our personal problems. We get shattered by the enormous significance of our involvement in the human drama. That shattering, accompanied by being overwhelmed, is the best way of translating fana and baqa -- annihilation and reinstatement. That shattering has transformative power because it deals with exactly that which is standing in our way -- the assertiveness of the ego.

I don't say it makes us meek. The dervishes are an example of tremendous power. It gives us tremendous power, but it's not an ego power. Pir-o-Murshid says that which is gained in life is the ego, but it is the false ego that stands in the way. This (Page 16) means our identification with who we think we are, and that which we have been led to think we are because we are encountering the assault of the outer world. If we lose a finger, we do not say we are that finger. The false ego has alienated itself from the total reality and believes itself to be a total reality. Reconnecting with the total reality is the basis of meditation.
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 Becoming Ourselves 

When we are reconnecting with the totality we don't have to do the head movement of the Dhikr. I find we can move our subtle body while we remain still. At first it feels like a circle, then like a spiral. Instead of dispersing ourselves in the totality, think that we are encompassing more and more, embracing instead of dispersing as we expand. We almost feel a need to lose ourselves in that totality, except of course we can't lose ourselves in the totality.

Especially if we have a bad self-image, we enjoy losing ourselves in God, in the totality, which is very hard to reconcile with our notion of our uniqueness. Psychologists are very concerned that merging with the totality acts in a way that is counterproductive to our personality. We have to have a very strong sense of ourselves in order to select what we want and don't want to ingest from the universe.

Murshid saw this very clearly, of course, and what he gave to the mureeds was a sense of containment. This is my responsibility. And it gives us a sense of vastness, but we don't lose ourselves in it. This is my realm, my Kingdom or Queendom. There is no limit to our responsibility. The more capable we are, the more that is put upon our shoulders. Also, whatever we do involves an infinite number of people, so at no point can we say, "This is the frontier of my kingdom," because our decisions affect, in fact, the whole universe. Every wave in the sea affects the whole sea.

That is absolutely typical of Murshid's attitude. Take responsibility, mastery, but think that we are taking responsibility as a delegate or an ambassador. The whole of Sufism is really based upon the ancient chivalry of Iran, called)' Utuwwat, and actually initiation in the Sufi Order is a covenant based on the ancient chivalry of Iran. It's a pledge of service.

So every morning we survey our domain and think, "Yes, well, I am responsible for this situation," and it's true. If we don't do that we might forget it, but we make a point of remembering and people depend upon our doing so. We are not exercising our power but delegating the Divine power, so our will does not come from an ego place, from an ego-trip, a power trip.

It would be counterproductive to just remain in our personal sense of identity. We always have to refer back to the totality coming through as us. Notice I did not say the totality coming through us, but coming through as us. Otherwise we think "I am this container and Divine power is coming through." There is still the sense of our own power. If we say, "This is the Divine power that is converging as what I think of as my power," then we don't have the ego game of the personal self.

Now we see our responsibility is in the world, but with regard to our husbandry of our own nature. There are things about ourselves that we don't like. Those are part of a defense system, so if we get rid of them we find some psychological withdrawal symptoms. These are in the unconscious; we don't acknowledge them, but they are (Page 18) in us. They play all kinds of games on us, so trying to make a surgical operation by getting rid of those elements in ourselves is not a good way of going about it, -- They have a role, you see. If we don't like it in ourselves then there's a judgement about it, which is telling us something. We are, however, in a continual process of transformation. In a flower, for example, there are fresh petals continually unfurling from within, and they can only find room to unfurl if the outer petals fall apart. We don't have to push the jaded petals apart because it is the fresh petals that will do it for us.

Pir-o-Murshid suggests that in our meditation we survey our kingdom, that is, our responsibilities. We reach out, but we are not losing ourselves, although there is no boundary to our kingdom, no boundary to our responsibility. There's always more. Still, there is some containment, there is a sense of, "Well, I can reach this far. Beyond that, of course, I have more responsibilities, but I'm not quite ready for them."

We have responsibility for our family, and for our friends. How far does it go? For example, there is a homeless person who is starving. Is that part of our responsibility? That's a very paradoxical question because by helping him we could be strengthening him in his alienation from society. There is someone being tortured in a concentration camp, and that is still happening in the world. Do you think that's not our responsibility? We know there is Amnesty International. We could do something about it. No, there is no boundary to our responsibility. It just depends on how we think.

That's what I mean by losing ourselves in God. If we don't like ourselves, and we're enjoying this losing ourselves, I can understand why a psychotherapist would say this is really counterproductive.

There are two attitudes here which are embodied in two wazaif. The first is Basit. Basit is expansion. The other is Qabid, which is convergence. When we're breathing out, we're expanding -- Basit. When we're inhaling we're converging the energy of the universe. That's Qabid. The Universe is becoming us; God is becoming us. We could replace the wazaif that represent these concepts with Wasi, which means outreach, our domain, our responsibility.

In samadhi, we take no responsibility. In Sufism we are a vice-regent of God. We are taking responsibility. Samadhi leads to otherworldliness. Taking responsibility leads to effectiveness in life. We survey our kingdom: "Yes, there is something there I forgot. There is a person who needs a letter from me, or a gesture, or something. I can no longer dwell on my problems, trying to get some entertainment from life." As we survey our kingdom we find ourselves developing the qualities of sovereignty, Qahr, and Mastery, Wali.

Mastery must always be balanced by lending ourselves to the self-organizing Divine power. So we say ya Wali -- ya Hadi, always the two. Wali is will power, but it's balanced by being in wait for Hadi, the guidance that may or may not emerge. We have an example of guidance in the case of Joan of Arc. This is controversial. Was she pathological? Psychotic? She was hearing voices. A lot of people in mental institutions hear voices and the doctors tell us it's delusion. That's what the church did with Joan. In her case it seemed to be miraculous, but many people engaged in the (Page 19) spiritual path sometimes play make-believe in their intuition, especially when it has to do with their own desires.

When does intuition aver itself to be authentic and when is it make-believe? We begin by being very cautious, consistently cautious, to never say anything we don't know, to never say anything we don't mean, like "How nice it is to see you again." (Of course we can say it if we really are happy to see the person.) That's why the English, in their coldness, say, "How do you do?" They're not committing themselves yet, only being polite. If we develop a great concern about Haqq, truthfulness, then we will not indulge in fantasies. We become a very authentic person. Then our intuition is vouchsafed by our authenticity. The best way to develop intuition is to become a stickler for truth. We can't reduce truth to facts though. So you see, it's not that easy.

There are always two sides to everything. Mastery can inflate our ego. We might want to prove ourselves to other people or to ourselves at the cost of other people. Without compassion, we are like the people who sent Joan of Arc to the flames. They were validating themselves as VIPs of the church by condemning this little girl.

Where does mastery come in? The psyche has a strategy to protect itself. We might say, "Well, I don't like my resentment. Particularly I don't like my anger and my spite. If I follow the way of Yoga, then I become the master and I am able to overcome everything. Not only can I slow down my breath, but I can control my thoughts and therefore also my emotions. So I annihilate that hatred in me. I don't like it!"

According to psychologists, of course, if we do that with our hatred, it will seek refuge in our unconscious and it will do things that we will not ascribe to our hatred because we have disavowed it. We might say for example, "I've overcome my hatred, and have forgiven this person." Then we're invited to a party. We find out this person is coming and we say, "No, I don't want him to come." We've forgiven him, but we don't want him at the party. Right!

We must be careful of the fight of the ego against the ego, my will against my selfishness, or greed, or whatever. If we remove those strategies we suffer from terrible withdrawal symptoms. We have to replace our crutches with something else. We can't stop drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, even if we know it's bad for our health, just by wanting to. (One can, and I did, but I wouldn't recommend it to other people because it is a crutch to which one has become addicted, grown dependent.) What we need to do is replace it, build up in ourselves, in lieu of that crutch, our pride.

Pride is a word we often use in a derogatory sense. The word as used by the Tibetans and, of course, by the Sufis, is pride in our Divine inheritance. Then it brings authentic power, with which we can discard our dependency upon the crutch. Pride comes through discovering our real selves.
 (Page 20) 
 The Awakening of Wisdom 

We're challenged on all sides, not only from outside by people, but also from inside, and we feel we need to use will in order to be able to face that situation. I think most of us are rather awkward and are going about it in the wrong way. We're trying to muster personal power. We don't need a bulldozer to kill a fly We muster all our strength, ready for battle with ourselves, creating a short circuit and confusion. Actually the truth is it takes a stronger power than our personal power to deal with the smallest situation. I remember Murshid. Incredible power came through, and yet there was no personal edge at all. I never felt an ego trying to affirm itself or felt he was uptight about not being recognized or anything like that.

There is the challenge, then, coming from outside and there's the power coming from inside. That's why we have to be very careful with the word Wali, mastery, and especially with Qadr, power, because they contribute towards our trying to validate our self, to prove our self to others and to ourselves. I prefer Qahr for example. Actually there's a word that I like very much, and that is Kabir, from which comes Akbar, Allah ho Akbar, great. It's an American word, everything is always great!

I remember I was in Shiraz trying to do a retreat in a place that was a rendezvous of the dervishes. Dervishes are very powerful. In the back there were photos of the Sufis of the 19th century. In the photos of those beings they were like kings. There's a kind of manner you see if one is the ambassador of God, because that's the whole chivalry, and the whole tradition. It's not good enough just to carry out the orders, one has to reflect the manner of one's king or queen. That makes for greatness. I know it's not the way of democracy, but it's the way of greatness, accepting and acknowledging the gift of the divine inheritance in our being and wishing to honor it in our personality. It is that way of thinking that makes us admonish ourselves for being puny. That would help us, for example, in overcoming resentment, "Don't be so puny as to be upset about this person who hurt you. This is ridiculous! I mean, who do you think you are?" Taking ourselves to task. Our resentment and our anger bring us right back into our personal ego again. I think the best way to meet those negative aspects of our selves that are so counterproductive is the sense of greatness. Instead of trying to master that situation, to master our thoughts. It's really being able to identify with that flow of the universe that is converging as us, not through us, but as us. As we go up the stream, let's say, we incorporate more and more of that richness. It makes for greatness, and it makes for people who are cosmic instead of personal and therefore a very wide spectrum of qualities will develop.

We can't work with these qualities. It doesn't work so well if we just try and develop compassion and truthfulness and those individual qualities. However, if we have that sense of the cosmic dimension of our being, then we know those qualities are there and that we can call them forth. They are latent. They are potential. We could illustrate it with a piano that has most of its keyboard scotch taped. We can play a melody, but a very limited melody. All we have to do is de-scotch tape the whole thing and then we can play whatever we like.
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The other practice I use to go along with that is Ishq Allah Ma'abud li'llah. This longing is really the divine longing to manifest to view. The whole universe is put in motion by the divine Ishq. We know the way of the Sufi is very different from that of the Yogi or the Buddhist. Those paths were intended for monks, whereas this is for knights. Trying to attain something in life or trying to have a nice house or nice car or nice friends, music, or whatever, is not un-spiritual or anti-spiritual according to the Sufis, as it would be to a Yogi, for example.

Here is a breathing practice I recommend: As we exhale, consider our exhaling as an extension of the divine exhaling whereby God translates the perfection of His/ Her being into existential reality. That means what we are trying to do in life is to translate in terms of our life those things that we value, because something is gained by the fact that divine splendor becomes beauty or majesty. That's what life is about. When we inhale, then we think the other way around. Our inhaling is an extension of the divine inhaling whereby we are undergoing a process of transmutation or distillation so eventually only the quintessence of our being is fed back into the universe again. It's like we are enriching the universe, and I don't think it means that we are lost forever. We could illustrate it by a wave interference pattern where the waves compose together and we think we've lost them, like eddies on the surface of a lake. We can't see them anymore because we know they're all intertwined and we think we've lost them. The fact is they can be retrieved.

That means death and resurrection is not a process of annihilation, but a process whereby we have a contribution to make to the divine programming. Perhaps you recognize in these two breaths the two poles of our being. On one hand, our need for involvement in life with people, with circumstances, and with matter, which robs us of our freedom. That's the price we pay, but we are enriched by it, and that's what life is about. On the other hand there are those moments when we feel suffocated and have been caught in a machine in the rat race, and we have paid for our freedom to such an extent that we are free no more. We realize to what extent we are conditioned. There's a longing in us for freedom, and that doesn't mean just freedom from conditions. The way we think is conditioned. The way we feel is sometimes conditioned. We're the product of an incredible amount of conditioning. The leeway of freedom within this conditioning is very, very small indeed, so there's a longing for freedom.

In the language of science, electrons feed on light, and consequently they begin to free themselves from an extremely narrow, constraining program and start jumping their orbitals. That would be a very good description of, for example, a ballet in which you give the dancers a chance of being a little more creative. To do that you have to provide them with energy. If a metal is heated, it begins to display more and more degrees of freedom. The more it is heated, the more energy it gains. That's what's happening in our modem society. People have gained more and more freedom. Pir-o-Murshid is talking about spiritual freedom whereas in the realm of religion, of course, we are very constrained and very narrowly programmed.

This is a breathing practice I do every day, first because it connects us with our ground, the Divine being. Our own breath is a continuation, an extension, of the Divine breath. Secondly, there are those two main poles of attraction in our life that (Page 22) seem to pull us in opposite directions unless we are able to see how they contribute towards one another, for example, that we can find freedom in involvement. Also it helps us to understand the purpose of our life, to make our objectives into our motivations. In fact, it's a very good practice to every morning ask ourselves. "What are my objectives?" Then we can even make a priority list and we can change the order, especially on the computer. "Now, this I think is more important. Well it's all more important, but still .... Okay, so these are the things I really value." I see people doing this; I see people really committing themselves to these ideals. The world is full of wonderful people doing fantastic things, people dedication themselves to helping those with AIDS, or working with the homeless, or being a fire fighter. Think of the war correspondents in Bosnia. There are a lot of heroes in the world. They represent our highest values.

The story of Joan of Arc is the most incredible story. Here she was, sixteen, when she led the troops against the British garrisons -- who fled -- because she heard voices tell her that she should. She was listening to the bells in a church and she interpreted them as voices telling her to go and crown the king of France. She was a little peasant girl, illiterate, from a little village somewhere. They tortured her; they captured her eventually and tortured her. They pulled her out of her cell in chains and made her sign an adjuration and then she suffered terrible agony because she'd let down the cause, she wasn't true to her voices anymore. It was very difficult for her because in those days the theologians knew everything and a little girl from the country wasn't supposed to know anything. The thought, "Well maybe, after all, they are right," and then all of a sudden she realized that whatever their wisdom, she had to be true to her voices.

That's dedication to objectives, and once we know the objectives then we can look at our life and see what our motivations are and whether they match our objectives. Of course there are reasons why they can't always work. At least we are very clear in our meditation. "This is what I'd like to do. These are the things I really value. I see why I can't do it because so on and so on. But there's one niche somewhere where I can do something of the kind that I value so much."

Sufis call that muhasibi, which means the examination of conscience. We examine all our dealings with people, one-by-one, each person. We think to ourselves, "Well, did I really apply my objectives there?" The mind will always justify and always provide us with an excuse why it wouldn't work and so on and so forth. We unmask the hoax of the mind. The main concern is to be very, very truthful, extremely, to the very limit. What makes us a dervish is being uncompromising about the truth to ourselves, not just to others.

The wazaif Kabir and Haqq are an extraordinarily powerful combination, because it is that concern for authenticity that gives us greatness and consequently power. That little girl, Joan of Arc, had a much greater power than all her enemies did together. When our way of dealing with things comes from that place of Divine power, we don't have to apply our will or our power because it works, and in fact it makes things happen, that's the extraordinary thing. It's almost magical.
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It's very strange how everything is connected in the world in such a way that we can't see it at first. We can't see how a change in our self is going to change our situation in life. It's as though everything were connected like those lotus flowers or water lilies in their roots, so we have to work on several fronts at the same time to be able to make good of our lives. One thing is achieving, and the other thing is knowing, and one is the relationship between the two. There's another wazifa that's linked with the background of power, and that is Ghani. Ghani is best described in a custom of the Sufis in India. If there's a branch of a tree, or a rock in the way on the road, they stop and remove it. They could very well go around it, so they're removing it for someone else. The dervish says, "Drop a penny in the well, but you must know that that penny is not going to give you luck. It will give luck to somebody else." Ghani is being a trailblazer. It's very curious because even though it doesn't benefit us, it enriches our being. We are not of service in order to be benefited by being of service, but it does enrich our being.

In Sufism, there's a mode of thinking that is acquired by doing. That's why sometimes it's good to connect a wazifa of doing with a wazifa of knowing. If we are asked what is our spiritual purpose in life, I'm sure that we say, "Well, my, yes, it is awakening," or then we might say it is illumination.

Of course these are slogans, these are words. What do we mean? Awakening would be seeing something that we had not seen before by a shift in our perspective; for example, we awaken from sleep in day consciousness. Then we could do the opposite. We could awaken from day consciousness into sleep. A change of perspective gives us a sense of realizing something we hadn't seen before.

These wazaif are sometimes interpreted differently by different people. I've studied the references to these wazaif by famous Sufi teachers and I can see they're different. So we have Khabir which is, I would say, great perspicacity, as opposed to Alim, which is wisdom. Khabir is the closest we can get to what we mean by awakening. The trouble is that these wazaif are used in different senses. For example, a khabir is an expert. Maybe we're a spiritual expert if we're awakening, becoming a spiritual expert. On the other hand, Alim is wisdom. That is a word Pir-o-Murshid brings out very much in his teaching, wisdom. Perhaps you know the saying of Murshid that wisdom is the product of the meeting between the knowledge of the heavens and the knowledge of the earth. When we hear that, we think, "Well, knowledge of the earth, I know what he means, or I think I know what he means. The knowledge of the heavens, well what does that mean?"

Suhrawardi proposes the witness in the heavens, seeing things from a different angle. The integration of these two opposite angles would give wisdom. So wisdom is not awakening; wisdom is a kind of maturity that comes to a person who is conscious of the Earth plane. That's not just because very often awakening is, in the East, considered to be downplaying the consciousness of the earth in order to highlight that which is beyond existence. For Murshid the important thing is spiritual realization in the world. Therefore awakening leads toward wisdom. Therefore that combination Khabir -- Alim is very wonderful. Khabir is a kind of insight, or perspicacity, that we get, and the consequence is it gives us wisdom. Wisdom is a more pragmatic thing, how we are able to apply our knowledge in concrete situations.
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It's good to see the relationship between awakening and illumination. That would be Alim - Nur, or Nur - Alim. Awakening is always in some way connected with light. It's not an intellectual thing. It has to do not only with the radiance of our aura but with luminous thoughts. 

Sometimes we use the words awaking and illumination alternately and indiscriminately and I think it's important to be very clear about it. The fact is that they go together. The more awake we are, the more light we radiate in our glance and in our aura. I think the most important thing is that dimension of light that is the light of intelligence. 

There is the light we absorb from the environment, so in a sense we are ingesting light from the universe, from the cosmos. We also emit that light in our aura, so that's one level of light. Then there's another mode of light which emerges from within, a new dispensation, the all-pervading light. It's not from without; it's from within. Imagine ourselves to be like a stars that is able to converge the diffuse light of the universe and then beam it out in one direction.

Then there's another light which is non-physical light. When we identify with that type of light we realize we were a being of light prior to our birth, so our aura is not just the light we've absorbed from the environment. Then we see the interaction between those different lights. There are several further levels; there's the level of celestial light, and there's the light of intelligence. Our wazaif do not reflect these differences. The word is a catalyst, but it's up to us to be clear as to what light we are aware of at the time, or working with at the time.

I'd like to point out the importance of the relationship between Nur and Munawwir. Our aura is Munawwir, the lamp. Nur is the light of intelligence. The light of intelligence seems to awaken or enhance the light of the lamp. That's the meaning of a light upon a light in the Qur'an. We're using that in the Universal Worship a lot, a light upon a light. If we say ya Nur - ya Munawwir, ya Nur - ya Munawwir, we're aware that our perspicacity affects our aura and makes us more radiant. 
 (Page 25) 
 Choosing to Work 

If we want to do something significant to bring about change then we have to use fairly strong measures, and these measures are bound to awaken all kinds of emotions. If we're not totally in control, these emotions of course can surface. It's better if we simply don't proceed beyond that point if there is any psychological dysfunction. There are things that need to be dealt with by a psychotherapist.

First, what are our objectives? Even though we mustn't limit ourselves by our projections, we have some kind of idea what we need. It's always beyond what we try to define with our minds. The trouble is we are using words, and words tend to become stereotyped into cliches. For example, awakening is a word; illumination is a word. The reality is developing insight into situations we hadn't seen that way before. This insight is going to help us unfurl the potentialities of our being.

We can never say "I'm illuminated! I'm awakened! I've reached illumination or awakening."' Pir-o-Murshid says, "The horizon advances the further one proceeds."

Transformation does not take place just by our wanting it. Meditation is a very, very elaborate technique, like musicianship, which requires a lot of know-how. We're going to share in the skills that are intended to trigger off a change in our perspective, in our way of looking at things, and furthermore a change in our sense of self-identity, our self-image. This is going to have an effect upon the way we handle our problems, so we have a sense of achievement, of fulfillment, in our lives. I'm sure there are many other things we hope to get out of this, for example, recharging our batteries. We tend to get depleted in the rat-race in the world. I do not consider that spirituality (whatever that is, another cliche) has all the answers and there are many cases where we must resort to psychotherapy. We don't want to play the apprentice sorcerers and try to meddle in situations which require that kind of expertise. On the other hand, psychotherapists who accept that the whole person includes all the dimensions, all the levels of being are very interested in those dimensions with which we are working.

At first, what we do seems rather elementary, but I'm beginning to realize more and more how important it is not to bypass these first steps, because otherwise we start getting spaced-out and living in some other world without having built a bridge with everyday reality. We're building something progressively and then, in the advanced stages, we're going to try to attune ourselves to our celestial counterparts, to the level of thinking beyond the kind of thinking that's based upon experience, and into further levels of experience. We're all familiar with the Dhikr, at least in its rudimentary form. First of all, the body participates in the experience, which is not the case if we're going into samadhi. We are moving outward, and that means we are moving from a center towards the outside, and then we are moving from outside toward the center.
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The totality suffers constriction by being fragmented, constriction in each fragment, each sub-whole, as is being said by Dr. David Bohm. We can think of ourselves as a sub-whole instead of a fragment of the totality. That means we carry within us potentially the totality, but most of it is inactive, recessive; only certain aspects of the totality are active. We could say then, that the totality suffers constriction in having to contract within our self-image. There's a consequence of that: we tend to alienate ourselves from the totality, or alienate our identity from the totality. The consequence is that we develop traits, features in ourselves which we ourselves don't like, and which other people like even less than we do.

Our first step is a kind of catharsis, what the Sufis call muhasibi, which means self-examination, asking, "What are the things in me that I don't like?" We could put it down to the fact that we lost sight of our real being by the impact of the environment upon us, upon our sense of identity. Somehow the environment exercises an impact upon our glance, forcing it into a certain focus. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to resist that impact and simply continue to be aware of the power of our glance that casts light upon things, rather than our eyes being an organ of perception. That is an example of what I mean by the way our whole upbringing, civilization, and culture somehow has had the effect of making us tend to forget, to alienate ourselves from our connection with the totality. That is why the way of the Sufi, I think, will make a very important contribution to spirituality in our time, because it consists of being able to see from two antipodal standpoints at the same time, the personal standpoint and the Divine standpoint.

If we're seeing things only from our personal vantage point, we're not seeing things clearly; we have a very clear bias. We can say, "How do I know what the Divine standpoint is?" All the skills consist in gradually espying, as the Sufis say, that which transpires behind that which appears. For example, we see the footprints of a bear in the snow, the pugmarks of the bear. We haven't seen the bear! That's what the physical world is.

According to Yoga, the world is illusion, our problems are illusions. According to the Sufis, they're not illusions at all. They are signs that are some indication of what is being enacted behind what we think is our problem. If we judge our problem by those signs, we haven't got hold of our problem; we're not dealing with our problem. So we are learning to shift the setting of our consciousness and awareness, our concept, our reality, and of course our judgment.

Start with a tabula rasa, our foundation. How much cover-up is there that we're not aware of? For example, ask, "Why am I doing what I'm doing? What are my motivations?" We know the mind plays all kinds of games; it's very deceptive. Can we distinguish the difference between wanting to build a peaceful world with beautiful people, and covetousness, for example? Covetousness is very close to envy, wanting something that somebody else has. That's covetousness. Envy would be a little worse. It's like feeling a very strong emotion, and destructive emotion can lead to hatred. That's what Pir-o-Murshid calls "the false ego."

There's no use getting into a kind of fictitious high state unless that ground is cleared. I'm not saying we couldn't eradicate our covetousness even by wanting to.
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I'm saying that in the Dhikr, we are moving from the center outwards when we say La. We are causing unconscious motivations and thoughts and emotions, particularly emotions, to surface from the unconscious into the conscious. That's muhasibi, self-examination. We're bringing things into light. It's a matter of owning up, saying, "Yes, it's true, I do have emotions, I do have antagonism against this person who harmed me." So what? These things, that we call negative, are the result of having forgotten our real identity. It's all part of the formation of the ego, which is that which is gained by life. The totality is fragmented but each so-called fragment, each sub-whole, that comes from being latent becomes active, so that the whole is included more and more into the fragment. This fragmentation does require a strong sense of the "I" so that "I" affirms itself: "I want this!" and "I don't want this!" and "I dislike this!" and so on. Instead of condemning it, we consider it's something that will find its place in the whole, like the color black in a painting; there's a lot of white, but there's a little black too that brings out the white, because that's all part of the whole.

The other thing is resentment. There's no doubt that resentment brings us into our ego consciousness, our identity as a discrete entity, so that it diminishes us and our self-esteem, and therefore our self-validation, and of course, our self-image. We can't, just by our will, eradicate our resentment or forgive someone toward whom we feel resentment. We therefore, try to reverse things and realize the total being is coming through each fragment, just like the whole tree comes through each branch of the tree, and the branch of the tree is unthinkable without the tree.

There's a way of doing it. Think of the thought which makes something click in our understanding and suddenly there's a whole different sense of identity. For example, "The atoms of my body existed at least as a potentiality at the moment of the 'big bang,' so somehow the totality of the physical cosmos has fashioned itself into this body." If we think of that, more and more, we don't just identify with our body but we're linking our body with its wellspring, with its foundation. As soon as we do that, we may perhaps experience the cosmos, the physical cosmos, coming through our body trying to manifest its whole bounty in our whole body.

In the words of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, "The consciousness of the universe, buried in matter, is trying to awaken in our very body." Dr. David Bohm says, "A change in your thinking is going to bring about a change in your body." (This has been confirmed by scientists.) We can change the circuits of our brain, change our identity, with just a thought like, "It's not just my body, it's the whole; it's stardust that has fashioned itself." I can think of this wonderful word of Jelaluddin Rumi who said, "The galaxies are just like foam on the shore of the sea. We came whirling out of nothing, sparkling like stars. The stars form a circle and in the middle we dance. The atoms are in ecstasy as they discover their identity and dissolve into God circling Himself."

This kind of cosmic vision is going to free us from our puny sense of 'me' as opposed to the 'others,' and thinking, "I'm angry with the others because they've been mean to me." This is a very small way of thinking, instead of thinking in a cosmic way. Imagine God suffering constriction in our awareness of what we think is ourselves, with all the consequences, which lead towards hatred and wars, and all that terrible (Page 28) cruelty and torture, not just covetousness, but also manipulating others for what we think is our own gain. We must be quite sure we're not doing that. I have to be sure that I'm not doing it. The mind deceives us very easily; it will always justify what we are doing. We have to dismiss those mind games.

If we are thinking of the Dhikr, then we realize that which was unconscious is now surfacing, as illa from the center, actually from way down. Think of the solar plexus as a gate, giving access to the states of the unconsciousness, and the whole thing erupting into illa. When it comes to the surface, it disperses. It's like anything, like our aura, it disperses as it comes through. As we become aware of the aura, that which was unconscious begins to enhance the effulgence of the aura, and then it disperses. That is, it spreads out, further and further and further, and eventually it forms, with all other photons of the universe, a kind of wave interference pattern. We can say what we call our defects are really our participation in the universe. Instead of thinking the universe is good, think of it as being all-inclusive, and therefore, for it to be enriching, it's has got to include both qualities and defects.

So instead of thinking, "These are my problems," we think, "This is the way in which I am participating in the drama of the universe. They are not my problems. I am participating in the drama that is now the universe." It's difficult for the mind to understand what we're about, what we gain by it, but hopefully, as we gain insight we begin to understand better. See the problem as a situation that has arisen in the complex relationships of our societies. Instead of saying, "Why does this happen to me?" say, "I'm involved in some way, and to the extent that I'm involved in it, of course, I do have an impact. It has an impact on me and I have an impact on it." It doesn't happen to us; we're involved in it, and other people are involved in some other way.

Now we come to the second step of the Dhikr. The first step is moving from inside out and the second one is moving from the outside in. We have to consider the impact of the environment upon us and that's what we call our problems. The fact is we are ingesting the environment, and transforming the environment. For example, a plant is a program that is endowed with an energy that transforms the environment into a plant. Likewise we are continually ingesting the environment, not only in our food, but psychologically; we're really suffering from indigestion. If we listen to TV all day, we'll be thoroughly saturated with impressions, some of which are good, and others that are really obnoxious and destructive. Obviously, we need to make a selection. The question is, can we project? If we're meditating, can we just reflect thoughts that are emerging in our mind? They are stronger than we are. How do we do it? How can we meditate at all, or just give it up as a bad job?

Let's take a sample from the body, the immune system. There are two immune systems. The fundamental immune system is based upon 'me' or 'not me'. For instance, when the body will not accept the transplant of an organ, it's choosing 'me' or 'not me'. Our psyche also has the ability to ingest impressions from the environment that are in synch with the essence of our being, but obviously to be able to make the choice we must have a very strong sense of identity.
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As we know, psychologists and psychotherapists accuse spiritualists of weakening the sense of personal identity. In Sufism there's strengthening of our sense of personal identity. It's that sense that gives us the ability to make a choice between those elements with which we are comfortable and those which we cannot handle, and trying not to be judgmental about them. I try not to be judgmental about heavy metal music, but it feels very difficult.  When we have a very strong sense of 'me', then we don't have to do much to reject impressions; they fall off us like water off the back of a duck. 

There is a second immune system which adapts itself to foreign agents, otherwise it would never be able to evolve, and also which adapts itself to our person. I think it is that aspect of our immune system, our psyche, that is overloaded. We lose ourselves in our adaptation to our environment. Meditation could be an opportunity for us to have a very strong sense of ourselves, and of the extent to which we're losing that sense by adapting ourselves to the environment. I don't say that we must not adapt to our environment, in fact it's the only way to enrich ourselves, but it's our selectivity which makes all the difference. 

At first we need to protect the psyche. It's like a young tree; we need to protect it. Then as it grows stronger, we're able to withstand more strain. I think we are being too lackadaisical about protecting ourselves from the terrible decadence we see in our world, in which we get dissolute and lose our authenticity. Meditation is the way of regaining authenticity.  

The wazaif are truly labels that we attach to archetypal principles like compassion, truthfulness, or mastery. If we know that language, it gives us a tool that enables us to say, "Yes, there's something in this, this impression that I'm getting into, that I must say is enriching to my being. I'm watching that person skiing or hang-gliding or conducting an orchestra. Something about that is enriching to me, because I have mastery, but when I see there are people really struggling, it makes me more aware of that quality.  In fact, that quality begins to emerge in me much more strongly than ever before." That's the way we are enriched. 
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 Starting with Detachment 

Nobody enlists us. Except in a few cases nobody forces us to go through the cauldron. I can hardly think of a case where somebody takes us by the skin of our neck and forces us into a cauldron, There is that attitude which in the East one calls vairagya, detachment, like water drops off the back of a duck. There's a sense that we can develop and that makes us beautiful, that makes for our special evolution. It's a feature of our freedom from the impact of the environment, our freedom from conditioning. Conditioning does lead to dependence. We become dependent upon things that are doing us harm.

Here we have this dichotomy in our lives. On one hand, our enthusiasm for being involved in ourselves and our life situations, and then on the other hand, our need for freedom. Of course, we need both. The ascetic just follows the way of freedom. We're in life and it's more challenging to be able to insert a measure of freedom into our involvement. The criterion is to see whether we have become dependent on that in which we are involved.

We have such a need for freedom. We suffer a terrible sense of constriction when we're not giving vent to our need for freedom. Imagine Buddha, for example. He had left his palace and donned the robes of a sanyassin, a mendicant. Imagine that emotion, that sense of freedom from dependence on the support system. We don't have to leave our palace to find freedom, but consider doing what Buddha did. Can we find a kind of inner freedom in the situation while being involved in the situation? That would mean that if the whole thing were to break down, we would not be distressed. If the person we love leaves us, we would not be distraught. That's seems inhuman, but I would say it would be very helpful for people who are involved in some distressing situation, if they could find some measure of freedom. Realizing the extent to which we have become dependent upon drugs, or upon tobacco or alcohol, do we see that dependence in our life? We're involved in a situation for the sake of achieving, but we don't want to wallow in the kind of self-satisfaction it can give, because something in our nature is the nature of the dervish or the sanyassin, the need for freedom. This aspect of our being is described by Pir-o-Murshid in the metaphor of the mirror. The mirror is not tarnished by the impressions cast upon it. If we turn the mirror, the impression is gone, the reflection is gone. We can do that. We might have a situation that becomes obsessive or compulsive, and then our freedom consists in being able to turn the mirror of the deep core of our being and somehow the impression seems to get more remote. Maybe it's not gone altogether, but gradually somehow the purity of the mirror seems to gain over the tarnishing of the impression.

To do this, think that the peripheral areas, the zones of our psyche, are dovetailed within the environment, so there's a lot of tarnishing that goes on, and a lot of enriching too, at the same time. It's like ingesting food. At first, it's not yet appropriated into the cells. It's being processed. Part of the periphery of our psyche is intermeshed with the environment. The outer aspect of our personality is not really (Page 31) us. We are playing a role or wearing a mask. If we identify with it we have lost a sense of our real being. Just think, "I'm playing a role because that's what life asks of me. I'm a father or a mother, or I'm a doctor or a psychotherapist or a politician. I'm a carpenter, or whatever. That's my role, generally. The trouble is that I identify with that role."

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan describes a king: "You think you're a king because people say 'Your Majesty,' and you're sitting on a throne." Our identity is somehow diluted by the environment, the way the environment mirrors what we think we are. A more typical case is the story of that young man who thought he was poor and his father had left him a fortune. We identify with a certain sense of identity, but that's make-believe, that's a role.

What we need to do in meditation is to turn within, to see very clearly that we are playing a role, and to acknowledge it. What the world is asking of us, and what we think is our personality or our self-image, is just a mask, it's not us. When we're able to do that, to dismiss or downplay that sense of identity, then all of a sudden we discover an image of our being which is much more authentic. I don't say it's really us, absolutely, but it's getting there. At least it's more germane than the self-image we have had of ourselves.

Now there's no way of defining ourselves. It's just a kind of sense of ourselves as an identity which is different from the one we had when we were identifying with the mirrored zones of our being. Now we can go one step further, and try to see if we have a sense of our real countenance behind our physical face, "that which transpires behind that which appears." Of course, there's always a danger that we are fantasizing idly, but somehow our imagination has some basic substrate. Our sense of truthfulness will keep us from fantasizing and then our imagination is authentic.

We find that our image includes the beautiful and ugly, good and bad and so on and so forth, all intermingled. That's part of our acknowledging the reality of our being instead of having a high falutin' sense of who we think we are. This is where I need to refer to the story of the voice of Caruso that can be retrieved even though it was very badly distorted by the bad recordings of the time. Now with new technology, we can reverse the distortions, which means that the authentic voice is present in the distortions and isn't lost. If we translate in terms of our being, we realize that even though there are distortions in our being from what we would like to be, these distortions do not take away the fact that in the depth of our being we are beautiful.

If we focus on the distortion in the bad recordings of Caruso, we have a sense of the real voice. Also, if we set our consciousness in such a way as to grasp our personality, we see the distortions. Then we are able to reach deeper below the distortions, and we see something of excellence. It's good to be able to recognize that excellence in ourselves, to help us overcome our self-image. We're not just that. 1, you, we are not just that. We are that distortion, but somehow the distortion does not take away the germane nature of our real being.





Part II:  Tools for Transformation

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 Aligning with the Divine Inheritance 

You could say that every fraction of the cosmos carries within it, potentially, the cosmos. That means as much as we are a fraction, we carry potentially in ourselves all those qualities that we ascribe to God. What the wazaif do is to awaken the God within. Knowledge is not the ultimate purpose; it is the awakening of the God within. Of course, if we discover God within ourselves then, it's too fantastic to believe, and that's where one is shattered.

Imagine that the bounty of the universe is hidden within our personality. Imagine that the Divine consciousness is hidden in matter, as Murshid says, or in our personality. Imagine that God is discovering Him/Herself in a secondary mode, a mode that accrues to the initial mode. In the initial mode God knows Him/Herself eternally in the principles of His/Her being. In the secondary mode, God discovers Him/Herself in that which occurs when these principles are actualized. Before actualization they're Divine qualities, yes, but how these qualities come through each person in a unique way is what makes God a reality. The interface between people adds a further dimension of knowledge to the universe.

We are not alone while repeating a wazifa. We are participating in a cosmic act whereby God, or the universe, is discovering Him/Herself in our discovery of God, or the universe, in ourselves. Without that connection to God the wazifa is just auto-suggestion.

We can always imagine a quality larger and more wonderful than the qualities we have imagined so far, Compassion, for example, or Truth. These qualities we ascribe to God and not to ourselves. As we proceed, we are discovering God predicated by a quality, and then another quality, and consequently awakening these qualities in ourselves. This is much more than just to manifest that we are the manifestation of God. Our experience is that God is present. Mawjud, God is present. That is a very deep experience. This is the experience of what we call the sacred.

We have gone to a church where we feel a strong presence. Certainly in India there are some dhargas where we feel a very strong presence. The Dhikr is the practice of the presence of God. That's what it's called. It's not God other than ourselves, God present as a second person. It's discovering God in ourselves rather than other than ourselves, so it's a very mystical experience rather than a religious experience. It all starts with being in a state of bewonderment. Just walking in the high mountains, looking at the sunrise, or lightning; there are a lot of experiences that are just overwhelming. We encounter people who are meaningful to us, or we listen to Bach; actually one is really meeting Bach by listening to his music. It's always like meeting God in different forms in which the one and only being appears. That includes those who are attacking us or who are even humiliating us. That is part of the drama. God appears as a warning. That is also the hand of God.

If we take our personal point of view, then we dislike a person who is countering us and we put the blame on him/her. If we feel it's God who is countering us and (Page 34) giving us a chance of learning by discovering in ourselves something that is being revealed to us, then that person is our guide. If we consider that the person is countering us, then we haven't learned from the experience. This is a very special approach that we find amongst the Sufis.

We must cleave to those qualities that are coming through us at this moment, and they will eliminate those things we don't like. Actually they are scattered. They are scattered into everything. Photons, protons, electrons, are being scattered all over the world, the universe. We are in a process of disintegration on one hand, and on the other hand building from within. We can only replace what we don't like by highlighting what is coming through now.

The language of the wazifa provides us with a kind of code. It's a language, a little bit different from the common languages, that provides us with a means of being able to identify qualities that are coming through us.

If we were told we can just prescribe our own wazaif, it would be like a doctor saying we can prescribe our own medicines. We would prescribe to ourselves the qualities that we feel would make us better adapted to the environment. We would figure out, with our mind, "This situation is calling for a certain quality, so, let's see, I'll look up in the book what the quality is. Okay, then I'll repeat the word." It's the mind saying that, our rather inadequate, finite mind.

We can feel a certain quality coming through now in us, much stronger then ever before. We always had that quality, but somehow it is much more important now. Before it was there but now it seems that our whole being depends upon it. It's revealing itself to us, or God is revealing to us, those qualities in ourselves being awakened in us, irrespective of our problems. That is in line with the Sufi view that we go through maqqam, stages, related to crisis situations in our life.

When we go through a crisis situation, it indicates a change of tack in us, somehow, which is calling for a new quality to come through. Then, interestingly enough, we look at our problems again, and we see that is exactly the quality we needed to meet that problem. We couldn't have worked it out with our mind. That's why I don't advise us to prescribe our own wazaif. Our guides are supposed to see that. A crisis has the effect of pushing the shadows away. We couldn't push them away with our will but somehow this new quality is so important for us that it gains ground in our personality.

All the wazaif refer to our divine inheritance. There's a practice we can do, to be very clear. We can try to earmark qualities we have inherited from our parents, or our ancestors. Then we can earmark qualities that have spilled over from the environment, from people, because there's a lot of osmosis between people. Qualities in one person seem to spill over in us, and vice versa. Of course, the same is true of defects and idiosyncrasies.

If we say the Divine inheritance, we have to be very careful of just using words, and assuming there's a concept. We have to be quite sure we are speaking about some (Page 35) thing real; otherwise it's only words. I think the ultimate magic, that's going to trigger off a transformation in our being, starts by a kind of confrontation between ourselves and what we imagine God to be. In fact, we are calling forth qualities in ourselves that we are projecting upon God. That is the only way, in my mind, to be able to make a reality out of that practice Ya Warith the Divine inheritance.

This can't happen if we think we're a fragment of the totality. It can only happen if we think the totality flows in each fragment of itself. The bounty lying in wait is so infinite that we are shaken by the sense of what this really is. Of course we're projecting qualities in our imagination but it's really the ultimate self-discovery. It's discovering who I am! We wouldn't have the courage to ever claim anything like that. That's why Al Hallaj was crucified. Yet it's the ultimate truth.

That's a power of the wazifa, to help us realize we are discovering our real being and that it is our self-image, the notion that we have of ourselves, that is standing in the way. It is a revelation of ourselves to ourselves through the vision God has of Him/ Herself through us, in which we participate. Therefore it cannot happen if we keep on identifying ourselves with our personal self-image. It won't happen that way. The power of prayer is that somehow we are carried beyond our self-image. It takes a lot of power to overcome our personal self-image. It doesn't happen like that. It takes a traumatic, shattering experience.
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 Reverie and Imagination 

We have this wonderful wazifa for working with the configuration of our subtle bodies in order to have a feedback system that gives us a sense of ourselves, so we can see ourselves mirrored in that image. That idea plays a very important part in Sufism. Ibn 'Arabi said, "Your soul projects its form in an image whereby it gives you a sense of the nature of your soul." It's a process of reflection that is creativity. Creativity is always translating a thought or an emotion into a form. Even though we know the form is just a means, a clue, it still acts as a feedback system. That wonderful combination is Munawwir -- Musawwir. Munawwir means the lamp and Musawwir means the sculptor, the fashioner. The lamp that is our aura is being confectioned in the form that expresses the nature of our soul, so we discover ourselves through these projections. It's not a one-to-one situation because our soul carries an infinitely wider range of bounty than our psyche and so that image, let's say those projections that manifest as images, are changing all the time. Therefore one of the techniques is to imagine landscapes (some of the Sufis call them landscapes of the soul), in which we discover aspects of ourselves.

There's this woman at the office who is a workaholic and the reason is she can't stand another woman who's spending all her time munching chocolate at the beach. As a consequence she finds it difficult to be peaceful because she doesn't like that kind of slovenliness, so she's forcing herself to beat her own records. Would you say we've jumped to the conclusion that this person is not peaceful? Actually it's just that she can't really make peace a reality in her being and call it forth. That can have rather disastrous effects because workaholism is an addiction. She can't make peace a reality in her conscious state because she would have to use her will. She doesn't want to use her will to be peaceful because she has a dislike for it, but the unconscious can do things the conscious can't do.

There is a way of meditating in which we get into a state called reverie where we are somewhere on the threshold between the awakened, the diurnal state, and the sleep state with dreams. Perhaps we've noticed that state. We're lying in bed and we can hear the cars in the street, and perhaps we're even aware of the furniture in the room and even of our body, but somehow or other, thoughts seem to run amok randomly without our being able to give them a direction or even some kind of congruence so they don't seem to tell us anything because they're not constructed in any way that makes sense. The same thing could happen with images rather than thoughts, all kinds of jumbled images. On TV in France they have these images rushing forth at a high speed so we hardly have any to time to see one because we're already on to the next one. I don't think it's very good for the psyche. That's a representation of the situation of someone who is rather agitated. If we control that situation, we'd slip into our ordinary state of consciousness, so we wouldn't be able to avail ourselves of what the unconscious is trying to tell us. If we simply fall into sleep, then we might not remember what our unconscious was telling us in sleep when we get back into day consciousness again. So we have to stay at the threshold between those two states.
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Now curiously enough, we can give some sense of orientation to the image formation.  We cannot determine the images we are going to see, but we can give some orientation to those formations.  As a matter of fact, we can program ourselves by auto-suggestion prior to going to sleep and then we find it happens.  The unconscious will always try to retrieve passing impressions that we didn't have time to hold.  We were passing in the street and we saw something, or we were in the car, and somehow that impression will come back in our dream.  There's a way of auto-suggesting images by passing in review pictures upon which we cannot concentrate because they are passing very quickly.   For example, we have an album of photographs, all kinds of photographs, landscapes, lakes, mountains, forests, deserts. We go through these without allowing ourselves to concentrate on one.  Even when we're interested in it we keep on moving.  Somehow the unconscious has been alerted.  Now all we have to do while we're in that state of reverie between day consciousness and sleep is to think,  "Yes, there was that picture that I passed so quickly I was unable to really get into it."  We find that we'll plunge into that landscape.  Try it out and see. 

There was a lake, and it passed quickly; then there was a desert or all kinds of other things.  Now we're in that state of reverie so we could precondition ourselves somewhat.  We could say, "Well, I would like to go into this scene of the lake a little more."  Then somehow we will find ourselves walking along the lake at midnight in the light of the full moon, in an enchanted landscape which seems to be transfigured.  Somehow our personality, even our body is different; it walks differently.  It reflects the nature of the landscape.  Somehow or other we have discovered an aspect of our psyche that became known to us through that image. By discovering that aspect of our being, then we will awaken it, so that the unconscious will sometimes erupt in the conscious and bring us that moment of peace right in the middle of a struggle.  

Now of course we know that we can imagine we are walking along a lake and imagine the moonlight, but we do that with our will.  If  we are in that threshold state, we give ourselves a signal:  "It's the lake, that's all."  But our psyche self-organizes itself in producing a much more detailed scenery than we could if we tried to figure it out with our conscious mind.  Our unconscious is telling us something about ourselves which our conscious mind has rejected and somehow it has a way of forcing its way upon our awareness.

Here's another scene. We're rock climbing. There's the abyss beneath us and there's the challenge and our courage is being tested.  We have the courage to go forth.  Perhaps we feel we're not quite competent enough to negotiate this very difficult situation.  Somehow that challenge calls upon a quality in us which is courage. We wouldn't have thought we had that courage unless there was a situation that called upon that quality.  

I suppose the wazifa for that would be Qadr or even Wali, but the wazifa itself, just repeating the word, doesn't do it for us. To be quite frank, just saying the word can't do it for us.  It's got to be associated with a whole attunement, a whole way of looking at things, a whole landscape and a discovery of latencies within us that are emerging, the whole package.  If we repeat Ya Wali, for example, when we're in that (Page 38) state before going to sleep, now again we look at that album and now we think, "Yes, oh those rocks, oh well, it's too late, I've passed it by." Then we get into that threshold state. We have just a little bit of will, not very much, but just enough to say, "Yes, I really want to pursue that rock-climbing scene." We find our unconscious will take us much further than looking at the photo would ever do, and we discover qualities in ourselves. This is true as long as we don't over-stress ourselves.

That's what Pir-o-Murshid says. By achieving something we acquire power, and with that power we can challenge ourselves to achieve something more difficult. However, we need to go step by step. If we over-stress ourselves, we lose trust in our capacities, because instead of giving us courage it might develop fear in us.

Now come back to Munawwir and Musawwir. While we're in the first stage of working with the aura we are breathing in and out and so we tend to just think of the aura in an amorphous image, as just a collection of light. Now while we're fluctuating we might be able to grasp the contours of our aura. It doesn't have a profile, but it resembles our face and our body, particularly the arms and shoulders. What we could do is, of course, look in the mirror. We could just think of someone who has done us a lot of harm, and we see the expression on our face. Then we could think, "I can forgive that person," and see the expression on our face. The mirror is the cheapest feedback system in the world. We see it right away, right there in front of us. There's no doubt about it. We can work with any wazifa, like Haqq, truth, and see what happens to our glance, or compassion, and see what happens to the expression in our eyes.

Once we've done that then we turn within to what is called the subtle body The word we use is latif, a wazifa that means subtle. Subtle would be, for example, clouds instead of rocks. Two clouds merge, whereas rocks collide, so it gives us a very harmonious sense of merging, as a being of light, with other beings of light and mirroring beings of light. It's a wonderful sense of communing with light. Then we get this extraordinary mirroring effect. We see how people react to our light or our darkness, and how we react to the light or the darkness of people. We describe this state, like the roots of the water lilies under the surface of the water, that network of connectiveness, in terms of light. Now we can do exactly what we did previously, but without looking in the physical mirror. We have a sense of the countenance of our aura, and it's a much better feedback system than the physical mirror.

Now we come to the important part, because at first it's a feedback system that gives us a sense of how our thoughts affect the configuration of our aura. Then we come to that point which is a very important breakthrough in meditation, and that's what we call making the states of consciousness corporeal. We are fashioning our subtle body so we become like a sculptor who is able to fashion our body of light. That means our state of consciousness in meditation is going to actually configure our subtle body of light. It not only serves as a feedback system but as a means of making our realization concrete, so it becomes reality. That's the meaning of Mawjud.

A very challenging thought is the Hindu theory of maya. To get to samadhi we have to be not aware of the physical world and we even have to be not aware of our thoughts or our personality. Gradually we overcome our existential conditioning (Page 39) and awaken beyond the beyond. That's Yoga. Now according to Sufism, the world is not maya; it is constituted by signs, devices, clues. From our point of view, this side of the veil is what the physical world is, or what all the situations are. From the other side of the veil, that's how God becomes reality. The device becomes the objective. It's a very surprising about turn in our way of thinking. That's what Ibn 'Arabi says, "He is the knower, and also that through which He knows."

We might think, "That through which He knows" is just the instrument, but ultimately, that is the objective because that's how knowledge becomes configured in its support system. The purpose of a blueprint is the house. If that is so, then we see the importance of participating in translating spiritual experience or attunement into the configuration of our own body and subtle bodies. The Tibetans carry that out very, very intensely. They concentrate on a statue to such an extent that when they walk in the street they think they are that statue that is walking. They are totally impersonated in that statue, like an actor who's able to get so much into the role that he/ she becomes that role.

The Sufis do not concentrate on the form, because if we do that the fashioning of our bodies is stereotyped. It is reflecting a statue; it is not really us. What the Sufis are doing is configuring the attunement of a wazifa, but each in our own way so each one of us is able to be totally ourselves. The consequence is we do not, for example, sit with a photo of our guru in front of us, like in a Hindu ashram. We get into the attunement of a master so we are able to see things in a way that we wouldn't have seen otherwise. Then we can configure the image of ourselves that was triggered off by getting into the consciousness of the master. In other words, we are able to see how the master sees us and then we configure ourselves according to the form that we have discovered when looking at ourselves through the eyes of the master. Now that is a very, very powerful method. In fact, that is the method that makes a Murshid.

I remember in my early training in Hyderabad in India sitting at the tomb of the grand Murshid of Murshid, that is the Murshid of the Murshid of Murshid, and I was being led by the grandson of that Murshid. At first I said, "My teacher is Murshid, so I don't want to concentrate on you." And he said, "Oh no, no, I'm just there to communicate the traditions of the Sufis, but you must concentrate on your father." Then, I just imagined Murshid in front of me when I was repeating the Dhikr. He said, "No, no, no, no-no, no, no, no, no! That's tassawuri Murshid, that's a picture of Murshid. That is limiting. No. You have to get into the consciousness of Murshid. Imagine that you are Murshid repeating the Dhikr. That makes all the difference, all the difference."

We can get into the consciousness of another person with regard to our problem. Of course we can get into the consciousness of a master, saint, or prophet, man or woman, and see things from their point of view. In fact, we can see ourselves from their point of view. We get into their attunement. Somehow that attunement is really in resonance with our own attunement, but our own attunement is perhaps latent and theirs is active. It will awaken that attunement in us by resonance: like when two harps, or a harp and a piano, are in the same room and they are tuned to the same pitch, the strings of one will resonate with the other.
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That image is changing all the time, so we have access to an extraordinary, rich, bountiful pool of resourcefulness, and when we come into the battle of life, we are coming from this deep place. Power comes from within. Insight comes from within.

Now it's very wonderful to do the three wazaif, Nur - Munawwir -- Musawwir, and see all these qualities being awakened by the fact that we are trying to fashion them into images. If we were composing, or painting, we'd be awakening latencies in our being, making them conscious, so we could apply them in our work of art.

The same thing that happens in our relationship with the master then happens in our relationship with God. In that case, it's traumatic, it's utterly uncompromising. There are no half measures here; otherwise it doesn't work. That is the reason for the second Dhikr. In the second Dhikr we are prostrating in a condition of, from one point of view it might be surrender, but it is really offering God (or the universe) the opening to take over without our intervening. First there is a total confrontation with God, a face to face dialogue, and then a real takeover so we do not have a will, and then we are delegated a will. A new will is delegated to us because then we have to take responsibility.      (Page 41) 

 The Dhikr 

The staple food of the Sufis is the practice of the Dhikr. Instead of just repeating La illaha illa'llah hundreds of times, thousands of times, we will explore very deeply each of the steps embodied in that practice and see what relevance it has for us, and the way it opens up perspectives that we have not foreseen.

In general, I don't want to make these preliminaries too long, but let us take a moment to remember the different states, settings of consciousness. For example, consciousness can be expanded, it can be contracted, it can be transcended. We can reach into a transcendent state, or even a sub-transcendent state. There are different perspectives of consciousness, and for each perspective there is a different mode of thinking. 

We're used to the familiar, commonplace mode of thinking, so it's very difficult for us to imagine that there can be other ways of thinking beyond our ordinary way of thinking. Scientists are beginning to recognize that we can't go any further in science if we just continue to think in an ordinary way. We use techniques that will trigger off these states, these modes of thinking. Just describing them isn't enough. We have to experience them. 

How do we experience them? How do we get ourselves into such a perspective that we're able to change our way of thinking and, of course, change our sense of identity? Distinguishing these different perspectives is like a hologram. We see things in a certain perspective and then we change the setting of our glance and we see things in another perspective.  We have to downplay one perspective in order to highlight another. Eventually what we want to do is to extrapolate the frame of these perspectives, and of course that's the problem. That's what we do with our eyes automatically.  Each eye sees slightly differently, they call it parallax, the difference between the setting of both eyes, but then somehow our brain is able to extrapolate between these two.

In meditation, it's a little more difficult because we have to extrapolate between quite a number of different perspectives. For example, it is not samadhi in the sense of the Yoga Sutras of Pantajali - not being aware of the physical world, which is a kind of learning that can lead to otherworldliness.
 
In the first step of the Dhikr, we just turn our head towards our left shoulder, then our left knee, and then our right knee, and then our right shoulder, and then upwards toward the zenith.  We described three-fourths of a circle as we exhale, and we think, "I'm reaching out into the vastness," like centrifugal forces reaching out further and further. "Features of my being that are buried in the unconscious of my being are coming forth. I can see they are matched by the same kinds of qualities in other people, or defects in other people, so as they come out they're no more just mine. They're part of the universe; somehow they're my participation in the universe." That's the first step.
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As we inhale, after our head is at the zenith, we turn our head towards our solar plexus. Now we do the opposite. We think of the way we are enriched and also sullied, tarnished, by the impressions of the environment.  It's our very strong sense of who we are that is going to act as what Buddha calls "the sentinels at the doors of perception," that are going to allow certain impressions through and reject others. We could think they're made up of several concentric zones. The more external ones are grosser, and they get finer and finer as we move towards the center. Each zone is protected by sentinels, and then they have to pass through the next row of sentinels. The impressions of the universe are being filtered. First there's one barrier, and then there are more and more and it gets deeper and deeper within us and eventually it is even resorbed in the void as we turn towards our solar plexus. The way the universe is forming itself it gets resorbed into the void and gets recycled again. That's where our head turns upward after turning downwards towards our solar plexus.

Now we exhale as our head moves in a heart shape instead of a circle. You'll notice we are facing forward, and we move our head upwards like a heart, and then downwards on the left side, then up again, from down below and then we reach right up, then go straight through the heart. The heart chakra is the point in that heart where the two loops meet. As we go into the heart now, we exhale, and while exhaling we are aware of the centrifugal forces that we are triggering off. That pure element in our unconscious is rising to the surface and reaching out into the universe.

When we say at first La, that means, no, the negative. Then illaha, as our head moves from the right shoulder to the zenith. Illaha means the cosmos, rather than the universe, the existential manifestation of the universe, the "foam on the shoreless sea." Somehow, we recognize the defects and qualities in our being to be features of the cosmos, a kind of matching. Instead of condemning ourselves, we recognize ourselves as a participation in the cosmos. 

They get dispersed, just like our pollution which gets absorbed by Mother Earth up to a point. As we inhale, the head, having been turned towards the zenith, descends towards the solar plexus, and at that time we think it's the whole cosmos moving into our being, we're ingesting the universe as it converges, and we place sentinels at the doors of perception.  It's just like when we're eating something we don't like to eat. We don't want to eat the shells of a nut, for example, things we'll reject anyway. In the digestive system there are a lot of elements in the food that are rejected. Then somehow those features of the environment which are filtered by our filtering system, the sentinels, get recycled. They go through a deeper transformation somehow in the unconscious, and are recycled again. As we inhale we experience the quintessenciation of the essence of what we've ingested from the universe.  Pir-o-Murshid says, "You can turn within. You can experience in the seed the whole fabric of the flower, the essence. The whole flower is present in its essence but in a compact way, as a concentrate."

When we are cogitating on problems, or cogitating on our assessment of our problems, instead of dealing with our problems, it is because we are looking at them from a personal bias. That was the first step in Yoga, in the Yoga Sutras of Pantajali. The first step we take is trying to clear our perceptions of our problems from personal bias. We are going outwards. We follow other techniques and eventually get to (Page 43) a point of realizing the cosmic dimension of our being. The first step would be to think of a problem in which there may be some conflict between ourselves and another person. Try now to look at the problem from the point of view of the other person. What in our mind, in our judgment, are the motivations that prompt the other person to handle the problem in a way that conflicts with our motivations? The next step is to try to see the person through his or her own eyes. How does it feel to be that person? Remember that this is, as much as we can grasp, the way that person is, irrespective of our bias toward that person.

Now take a second person involved in our problem and do the same. We might realize that the way the person is handling the problem is partly biased by his/her sense of who we are. In other words, s/he sees us through his/her eyes, and so it is good for us to see ourselves through his/her eyes. We see that his/her sense of who we are is totally different from the sense we have of ourselves. Now we're beginning to understand much better why s/he is handling the problem as s/he does. We can see the relationship between who we are and the way we're handling the problem. For example, there's a fear in us and we're handling the problem as dictated by fear, so we're extra cautious, to the extreme, "nothing ventured, nothing gained," to the point of enhancing our fear.

There's a saying that we spend a lot of time worrying about things that never happen. That's one aspect of fear. There might also be a feeling of jealousy, such as, "This person would like to come into my place, and I don't want it." Or we are fulfilling a purpose and that would defeat the purpose we're following. We have to be very, very clear as to what's motivating us in this situation, and that we do not mis-assess the motivation of the other person, because even if we try to get into the consciousness of the other person, it's doubtful that we can do it perfectly. There are some personal projections, and so we're mis-assessing the person's motivation in handling the problem, and maybe not totally acknowledging our own motivations. It's possible that the person sees our own motivations and we can't see them, so there's a kind of mirroring effect.

If we extend this to a third person, and a fourth person, and so on, we realize that what we see as our problem involves the whole universe. There's no end to our participating in the drama of the cosmos! If we carry this skill further and further, we reach a point where we're able to see how the situation looks from the point of view of the universe. I'll quote St. Francis of Assisi: "That which we are looking for is that which is looking at us." Total reversal! Not only do we think we're being looked at by the universe, but if our consciousness can reach right out into that antipodal vantage point, then we can see ourselves at the butt-end of that vantage point. There's a little shock of course. All our wishful thinking begins to break down and we're not at all what we thought we were, for better or worse. We begin to see how very biased we are in our self-image and in our motivations.

That's what we do in the Dhikr. When we turn our head towards the solar plexus we imagine that not only are we ingesting the universe, but the universe is looking at itself as us, and even discovering itself as us. So here we have these antipodes, vantage points, of the personal and the totality.
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The Sufis describe the palace of mirrors, where there are two mirrors facing each other, and they keep on reflecting each other over and over again. Meditation connects us with the totality of which we are a part. If we don't do that then we are circumscribed within our own limited sense of identity, and we turn around in a circle and we never get anywhere. Dhikr is a way of getting out of this vicious circle, breaking out of the circle by the motion of the head downward and upward. The head comes up again after having descended and enters the circle again, so it's like a heart. As the head moves, from being turned downwards towards the solar plexus, concentrating on the heart center, we're beginning to attune to the different levels of our being. If we lift our head upwards, then, into the different planes, we find that in the middle of the heart there is an axis from the point where the two loops meet, moving upwards. The heart is a circle that has been subjected to the gravity pull of the earth, which is compensated for by the wings. We can think of it as an arrow moving upwards from the place where the two loops meet. We're making a circle from that point which corresponds to the heart chakra and up, around and down (we'll feel the gravity pull of the earth), and then up and outside, and we move right down into the heart and into the solar plexus, which is deeper than the heart, as we inhale. We continue to inhale as our head moves up.

In the Sufi Dhikr, the head descends again into the heart center. The reason for this is we don't only want to awaken beyond life, but in life. Having awakened beyond life, we awaken in life, so we get back to our heart center again, and then we go into a circle, slowly, to be able to experience all the things I have enumerated. Immensity! The circle, into the heart of the circle, immensity, That sense of immensity draws us, draws the elements of our unconscious up to the surface and then they get dispersed and the whole universe absorbs them, the whole cosmos. That's because when we are circumambulating a center, it awakens that center. That center is the solar plexus, which acts as a gate between the unconscious and the conscious. As soon as we become aware of those features of our self, which we might call our faults, or defects, suddenly by the very power we set into motion, they get thrown out, dispersed. They find their match in the universe. It's like wave interference patterns.

It's very difficult. We can't dispose of our faults like that, in one goal. It'll take time, but if we keep on doing it, there's a sense of dispersing elements that have become so deeply imprinted in our psyche that we don't know how to get rid of them. We could think, for example, "Yes, I'm getting free of my fear, my anxiety. I'm getting free of my resentment, because I'm owning it. I'm not tarnishing it. I'm not blaming myself for it. I see that it's the result of having lost touch with my real self. As soon as I see myself as part of the universe, it's much easier to let them disperse." Now, we're thinking of the cosmos instead of the universe. As we go in the circle, think of the starry skies, the galaxies, and then at the level of the psyche, let's say the psyche of the universe that includes all those qualities we label as good and bad.

Here we have a choice. We put our defects out. (I hope there's no offense if I say we have defects.) We put them out on account of the way we're participating in the nature of the totality that has suffered by its fragmentation. We find they correspond to our sense of our personal identity, and even hold us in that identity, whereas we want to discover all the dimensions of our being. These emotions are standing in the (Page 45) way of our discovering our cosmic identity. The other way around is true also; that is, discovering our cosmic identity will rid us of these defects that are so distressing.

I have been asked what happens to those thoughts we wish to oust, as we wish to clear the aspects of ourselves that we don't like?  We are in a process of continually disintegrating and rebuilding.  At the jagged ends we get dispersed, and inside we get rebuilt.  Now in the Dhikr when we say la illaha, one aspect is that our being gets disintegrated in the totality and then it is rebuilt from inside.  In the second Dhikr we don't have to worry about the disintegration.  What is much more important is we have this encounter with that being through the intermediary of our projections, that is God as an effigy.  It must be so overwhelming that we feel like prostrating before it, because the body partakes in the action of the psyche.  Then somehow something happens.

If we visit a dharga in India, the tomb of a Murshid, and we prostrate at the feet of the Pir, and then the Khadim, the person who's watching over the grave, pulls you up. We don't redress our body ourselves, but somehow it is being pulled up.  So, after saying illa'llah we feel,  "I'm being elevated. I'm not trying to reach the crenelations of the castle by my will, but I'm invited to participate in the cosmic celebration."  

People used to bow, to prostrate when they came in the church, on their knees and hands.  Then in Victorian days, of course, it wasn't good for the creases of their trousers so they just did a gesture, but not too much.  In Islam, of course, it is done and in Buddhism.  We have to experience what it's like, if it's a novel experience. There's a saying of Shams-i-Tabriz:  "The body of the man of God is a palace in a ruin."  

When we say Illa, then we are turning within, to that place we described under the surface of the water where everything is intertwined.  Then, there is the 'llah. When we say the 'llah after the Illa, we are in the plane of Mithal which is the creative plane where we are projecting the image of ourselves. We have a projection of ourselves in front of us like in a mirror. We don't pronounce the first A, but the first A of Allah is where we are emerging out of the void, and that's why it is silent.  In order to be creative we have to muster all the levels of our being. Think that we are following our nostalgia for what Pir-o-Murshid calls the unattainable.  Somehow we are being lifted. Our sense of identity or our attunement is shifting into the celestial spheres, and then beyond that, into the plane Lahut which is the plane of the archetypes. That's what we are invoking in our wazaif.  Then comes the ultimate oneness, Ahad. That is the H  of Allah. When we say Hu, the H  was already started at the end of the ascent. Then our head turns towards our heart and the H becomes Hu because that's awakening in life.  
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 Forgiveness 

On one hand, we ask to be forgiven for our trespasses; that is, where we have conned other people. Secondly, we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Doing that will help us. In one of the Apocryphas, when Christ was on the cross, he said, "Forgive them for they know not what they do." If we don't know what we do, then it's easier to forgive. In fact, it's the only way to forgive. Then we're free! The power has set us free from all that stuff that is weighing us down. We can be ourselves! We can begin to like ourselves, to be comfortable in our bodies.

One cannot be damned forever; that's the saving grace. That is what is meant by the Divine compassion. We are free to forgive others, to exercise the same compassion that we ask of God. We ask of ourselves the same compassion. It's impossible to be taken off the hook if we can't take others off the hook, too.

Somehow the immaculate nature of the call of our being seems to gain ground and evade those murky areas. That's the saving grace, that we can forgive ourselves, instead of asking forgiveness of God, by allowing that internal purity to gain further ground. It will sweep away those elements with which we are not comfortable, because otherwise they will persist. In other words, it's our sense of our spiritual dignity that acts as the best therapy; hence, the need for the sacred.

The one mistake we must be very careful about is, as we turn within, there is a tendency to simply encapsulate ourselves in our psyche, or at least the more external zones of our psyche. We are judging ourselves as we are judging other people, or judging the world, or other circumstances, or assessing problems. Here again, we are trying to apply the same kind of principle upon which our commonplace connection with the world is established. We are trying to apply it as we turn within and it just doesn't work! Vedanta sees the way very clearly, and makes the distinction in our relationship with what we call the world, the relationship of "otherness" where we are the subject experiencing other than ourselves. When we turn within we tend to do the same thing. We tend to think of ourselves as a subject looking upon our thoughts as the object, not getting anywhere. What's even more confusing is there's a different relationship than the "I/it" relationship, which Martin Buber calls the "I/ Thou" relationship or even the "I/I" relationship. It is, as Shankaracharya points out, "You are both the spectator and that which you are experiencing."

We would become a split personality if we thought of ourselves as the subject and our thoughts as the object, because by observing our thoughts they incur distortion. For example, we can never see an electron because to see the electron we'd have to use protons which distort the electron. We'll never be able to see it; that is Heisenberg's principle. We have to be careful about our personal bias, no longer applying to the world, but applying to our own inner scanning of our own psyche. The way to do it is instead of thinking that we are encapsulating ourselves with a boundary, thinking that we are interspersing with the universe, like waves intersperse with other waves, instead of particles that collide. Now we have a different relationship with the universe, as though we could reach it from within outwards.
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Swimming in a pool of water we see lotus flowers. Then we swim under the water. We see separate flowers when we're swimming on the surface, but when we swim underneath the surface of the water we see there's a network of roots. This network of roots emerges here as a flower and there as another flower, but basically it's roots. As we turn within we see relationships between events which we could not have seen when we were in an ordinary state of consciousness. In our ordinary state of consciousness, we only see our more overt relationships. For example, we're only aware of the spatial relationship between the sun and the moon during an eclipse, but there's always a spatial relationship between them. We're not aware of that because in our ordinary consciousness, we only experience that which is related to our sense of our personal "I." As we turn within, our sense of "I" disperses. Instead of being the subject located in space at a certain place in time, the subject in us disperses.

In order to do this, we have to start by changing our sense of bodiness. Think that our body is just a hard core within our electromagnetic field, for example. If we know something about science, we'd say there is a transit between a wave and a particle, because there's such a thing as a standing wave. That is, a wave can behave sometimes as a particle. Let's say our body is like the particle, like that aspect of that deeper reality which is like a field materialized in a tangible way in time and space. It's not a matter of just being aware of the force field around our body. If we can feel that, we see it doesn't have a boundary. It doesn't correspond to our skin; it seems to extend far beyond our skin. It doesn't have a boundary but still, if we're very sensitive we can feel zones. Up to this point there's one zone, and then there's another; maybe it's another frequency.

It's not good enough just to feel that. Actually the field is also interspersed within the cells of our body. It's like the field of a magnet. We can put metal filings around it, and we can see the structure of the field. Actually, the field is also inside the magnet; it's not just outside. The same is true with us. Don't just think of the field as external, but think that our body has emerged out of this field, just like a chemical solution that has jelled into a crystal.

We shift our sense of identity to identify with that field and we see that it intersperses the fields of all beings. Our sense of identity, then, is not based upon boundary, but is based upon the frequency pattern. That's the root truth of it. It's like radio waves. Their identity is not due to their spatial location but to their particular frequency. So we can never lose ourselves really. Even if we form with other wave interference patterns, we can't lose ourselves because that particular frequency pattern is still there, and can be fully retrieved.

Turning within, we think we are setting up barriers, and we are encapsulated. We think we are turning around in circles in our mind. No, it's the other way around. The way the mind thinks is reminiscent of being in our ordinary state of consciousness, but that way of thinking, as the Hindus say, is maya; it is illusory. The Sufis would say it is the way we perceive signals, signals that are telling us about a deeper reality behind the scenes, because if we turn within then we realize that our ordinary thinking is not valid anymore. At best it has relative value, but it does not give us a sense of the kind of meaningfulness that we want to discover as we turn within. The (Page 48) only way to do it is to think like this: "I'm trying to express in words how I think. By trying to express what I think in words, I am somehow limiting my thought." That's the usual way of communicating it, but behind what I say or I explain is what I imply. When we say "I imply something," it means that we expect that other people will pick it up, because it's implicit in our speech.

We imply a lot of things. We imply that person is there and that we are here. We take it for granted that what we imply is the context of what we might call discrete thought. A thought is just like the particle that expresses the whole field, just the way what is implied behind it is never formulated in a way that can be explained; it cannot be articulated. The beauty of silence is that we are not in a situation where we are called upon to explain to others how we feel or think, and consequently somehow to monitor our thinking into the limitation of language. It has an advantage of course; it makes our thoughts more clear, more definite. Sometimes even if we're not speaking, we're so used to speaking while we're thinking that we're formulating our thoughts in words. If we're in silence for some time, then we lose that habit of communicating our implications in language. All of a sudden, it's not as though we grasp what we imply; we really get immersed in it, lose ourselves in it. We dissolve into what we imply. In fact, we realize that we are our meaningfulness. That's what we are. Our body is just a support system, and so is our mind.

As we turn within we shift our identity from identifying with the more peripheral features of our being, to identify with the more authentic features of our being that are really us. At the periphery, there is some overlap with the environment, some spillover. All of a sudden, "This is me! Yes! This is me! I've been adapting myself to the environment and doing all the things that are required of me, but somehow I lost myself. This is me!" It starts by a focus of consciousness; instead of focusing on the outside, we focus inside.

Pir-o-Murshid says, "Our consciousness is continually called upon by the environment." Suppose we put a barrier in the way of our communication with the environment, then somehow our consciousness would turn within. What I'd like to add is that our consciousness itself becomes dispersed. In other words, it becomes cosmic, or at least reaches into its cosmic dimension.

Here is a practice that is helpful. We place the tips of our middle fingers on the nostrils, but don't press yet, and then place the fourth and fifth fingers around the lips, pressing the lips tight. Now place our index fingers on our eyelids, but we must roll our eyeballs upwards, so we don't exert any pressure on the cornea. That would exert pressure in turn on the retina and give us optical illusions. We would see what we think is marvelous heavenly light, but it would just be an optical illusion. Now we can put our thumbs in our ears. Simply breathe in through the right nostril, that is pressing our left middle finger on our left nostril, and then hold the breath by pressing both fingers, and then exhale through the right nostril. Don't inhale through the left nostril nor exhale through the left; always, only through the right. Only three breaths, after which we gradually take our hands away but keep our eyes closed.
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 Now we can reach out from inside. For example, we could experience what it's like to be another person, to be a friend, for example, really getting into the attunement rather than getting into assessment of the problems, the way they see you, and so on. This is much more into the attunement. The Sufis say tawwajeh, instead of tassawuri, getting into the attunement of the master or saint or prophet or holy man or holy woman, instead of trying to understand what they're saying. It's more like what the Sufis call the 'knowledge of the heart'. If we really imagine we are that person, then we get totally into that person's attunement, consciousness. Not thought, no, it's much more. It's not like telepathy. We're not reading a person's mind -- that would be an indiscretion -- or even their body consciousness. No, it's at the soul level. In fact, I find the best way to contact a person is to imagine him/her in his/her meditation, getting into a high state. That's where we can really reach him/her, because we have a great affinity so we are experiencing bioresonance, rather than receiving 'otherness'. In fact, it can elevate our soul. We can be inspired by the attunement of a being, and maybe we are inspiring that being also; so there's a mirroring effect.
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 My Will, Thy Will 

What we want to do is to be able to avail ourselves of that kind of insight which we develop in the course of our meditations, and we want to apply it to dealing with our problems. For each setting of consciousness there's a different mode of thinking. If our focus of consciousness is turned inside out, then our mode of thinking is going to be different. I have already said we think what we imply or what people imply. We could be more specific, and that means we see the problem in its context instead of its content.

Problem is content. It's circumscribed by our range of understanding. We circumscribe the problem, and think, "This is my problem." Now as we turn within, we see it's context, in other words, what it implies for more and more people. We begin to see what are the issues that are being enacted in our problem, as though the whole problem is really there so eventually the truth will erupt. The whole problem is there so eventually one will learn to love; or the whole problem is there so one will learn not to coerce people with one's will, and so on. We're beginning to see the problem in its relevance instead of just the factual description of the problem as it appears to our finite mind. We are placing barriers at the doors of the perception. Not just sentinels, but real barriers. There's no sound; we close our eyes and we don't see anything. There's still some kind of tactile cognizance, but even so that's very remote. Perhaps we sense the wind blowing if we're sitting outside. Even the sense of smell is gone. We are downplaying our subjection to the physical impressions of the environment.

The next step is, while we're doing this, to downplay our commonplace assessment of our problems because we can't grasp what is behind them while we are assessing them at their face value. We can't see the mirror while looking at the reflection in the mirror. We could, but it's really very difficult. We can't extrapolate between these two perspectives. For the time being, we just downplay our assessment.

We can't see the stars while the sun is in the sky; the stars are there, but the light of the sun impacts us much more strongly and therefore we're not aware of the light of the stars. In the same way, if we downplay one, then the other one begins to transpire. If we downplay our assessment of our problem we think, "Well, what if it's wrong? I'm turning around in circles. I keep on thinking of my problem the same way, and that is totally counterproductive. So, what if it's wrong?" Then a sense of meaningfulness can emerge; we see the problem in its context. We see other problems we hadn't thought of that come into the problem.

We might think, "I'm a denizen from other spheres and have landed on the planet thanks to my parents having provided me with a body, and somehow at the start I'm immaculate."' If we look into the eyes of a baby the light in its eyes has not been tarnished by the shadows of the world. "Then somehow when I started to grow up, I started to become, well, selfish, defensive, fearful, aggressive, so on and so forth. I was hurt. I incurred damage in my psyche because of the egos of other people, and (Page 51) then I did things to which I didn't totally subscribe, but there was a compellingness of the body, whatever it was, curiosity. Somehow I forgot who I was. Now I've stepped into this problem which I myself got into, even if I don't think I did. There may have been something in me that called for that problem. Somehow I'm participating in that problem to such an extent that my whole being is involved in it and other people, too. If I just look at the problem at face value I don't see all that is involved in it. So I'm just blind. The worst thing is, of course, that I'm schlepping this assessment of this problem into my life all the time, into my psyche. I'm carrying this with me all the time, this totally false assessment of the problem. So can I see? Now I see the problem is the context. I see that I change that problem by how I handle it, and the way I handle it depends on my understanding of it, so that ultimately my understanding of it is crucial to the problem. For example, I can see what the problem does to me but can I see what I do to the problem?"

Our understanding depends very much on our self-image. The self-image is extremely inadequate. In the old-fashioned view of life, God is eternal, up there, and we are miserable worms down here. I'm being manipulated by this big man with a white beard. That's the old-fashioned view. So, if you can think of yourself as being this being (to tell you the whole truth, God is a virtuality), S/He becomes a reality in us as us. I'm sorry if I'm shaking a lot of faith, but that gives us a still greater faith. The Sufis say, "Where do you find God if it's not here? Why are you looking for God up there?" Somehow, our self-image is connected with our sense of God. If we think of God as 'other', our self-image is inadequate. It's distorted. In fact, the only true realization is by being in the Divine consciousness; God becoming a reality as us, God awakening as us, in our problems, as us in our problems, not us in samadhi, but in our problems.

God walking on earth and stepping into that problem through our involvement; God suffering constriction, Qabid, constriction. For example, we think the world is three-dimensional; we make a two-dimensional photo of what we think is the three-dimensional reality, so there's constriction. That means the photo has to suffer somehow. It can't carry all the details of the three-dimensional reality. That's what's happening in us. The more we identify with our personal self, the more constricted, the more we constrict the totality which we call God, and thereby distort it.

Looking into our problem then, if we just think of ourselves as a denizen from outer space landing on planet Earth and we're getting ourselves inveigled in all kinds of problems and situations, and then being altered by that. That leads towards awakening. That's awakening in life.

Jesus said, "Forgive them for they don't know what they do." This is really confirmed now by science. There are circuits in the brains of psychopaths. Psychopaths were chosen as guards in the Nazi concentration camps. They were psychopaths; they were chosen. They acted as if they were running amok in New York and killing people. It's been ascertained that there are certain functions of the brain that are not the same as in what one calls normal people, if there is such a thing as normal people. I remember quoting David Bohm, and of course it's now confirmed, that a change of meaningfulness is going to change the patterns in our brain, and in fact in our whole body. That's why even our sense of bodiness, being our subtle body, (Page 52) corresponds to a certain way of thinking, and it affects our way of thinking. Our way of thinking also affects our body; it works both ways.

Instead of thinking that God is up there and us as miserable worms, or the soul eternal and the body corruptible, or perishable (that's the old view), the new view is that our body is a continuity in change. That is, reconciling the irreconciliables, complementarity instead of thinking in categories, a different mode of thinking. Thinking that we're transient and eternal at the same time, whereas in our ordinary logic, either we're eternal or we're not.

I remember being at university studying logic, a long time ago, in 1936, and at that time it was syllogistic logic. Man is mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. That's syllogistic inference. Whereas, in fact, it never occurred to them that man, the human being because it means women also, is both mortal and immortal. It's a different way of thinking. We can be happy and sad at the same time, and we can see things from our point of view and the point of view of another person at the same time. This is complementarity. We can see things from our point of view and the Divine point of view at the same time. This is a process that we're going through. These are just techniques, ways of thinking that all of a sudden trigger off a new insight and then there are enormous consequences in our personality, even in our body.
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Appendix:  Selected Teachings on the False Ego

by Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan


In brief, one may say that the inner life consists of two things: action with knowledge, and repose with passivity of mind. By accomplishing these two contrary motions, and by keeping balanced in these two directions one comes to the fullness of life. A person who lives the inner life is as innocent as a child, even more innocent than a child; but at the same time wiser than many clever people put together. This shows as a development in two contrary directions. The innocence of Jesus has been known through the ages. In his every movement, in his every action, he appeared to be as a child. All the great saints and sages, the great ones who have liberated humanity, have been as innocent as children and at the same time wiser, much more so, than the worldly-wise. And what makes it so? What gives them this balance? It is repose with passiveness. When they stand before God, they stand with their heart as an empty cup; when they stand before God to learn, they unlearn all things that the world has taught them; when they stand before God, their ego, their self, their life, is no more before them. They do not think of themselves in that moment with any desire to be fulfilled, with any motive to be accomplished, with any expression of their own; but as empty cups, that God may fill their being, that they may lose the false self.

Then there is no more a conflict, but a blessing. And the asking of the name is a paradox, for when once the false ego is crushed, the soul does not know what its real name is; for the old name belongs to the false ego, and he is given the true name, Israel, the great Name of God. In reality there is only one kind of angel; but their relation with human beings, and their desire to experience life through human beings, divides them into nine degrees. Then there is a belief that there are angels who are the inhabitants of heaven, and others who live in the contrary place; those of the heaven are called Nur, light, and the others Nar which means fire in Arabic. This is an extreme point of view; in reality, they can be distinguished as two kinds, Jelal and Jemal, Angels of Power and Angels of Beauty. A question arises as to why the angels who descend on earth as angels do not come as human beings, for every human being was originally an angel. The angels who are related with human beings are souls now in the angelic world, and they keep connection with human beings because of their wish; and now that they have returned from the earthly regions to the angelic heavens, they still keep in touch with the earth, either being on a certain duty or because of their own pleasure.
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What connection have the returning spirits with the inhabitants of the sphere of the jinns? They are as far removed from them as one planet is from the other, and yet are in the same universe. Do they meet with the inhabitants of that sphere? They do, but only such spirits as are not closed in or imprisoned in their own world; those who have gained strength and power even while on earth to break the ropes that bind them, and have liberated themselves from any situation, however difficult. But how do these brave ones arrive at this stage? By rising above themselves. If this limited self which makes the false ego is broken, and one has risen above the limitations of life on all the planes of existence, the soul will break all boundaries, and will experience that freedom which is the longing of every soul.

Might one say, then, that it is a good thing from a mystical point of view thus to become selfless? No, this is not the way to become selfless; in this way one is robbed of the self. The mystical way to become selfless is to realize the self by unveiling it from its numberless covers which make the false ego.

Self-denying is to deny this little personality that creeps into everything, to efface this false ego which prompts one to feel one's little power in this thing or that thing; to deny the idea of one's own being, the being which one knows to be oneself, and to affirm God in that place; to deny self and affirm God. That is the perfect humility. When a person shows politeness by saying, "I am only a humble little creature," perhaps he is hiding in his words. It is his vanity, and therefore that humility is of no use. When one completely denies oneself, there are no words to speak. What can one say? Praise and blame become the same to one; there is nothing to be said.

And how is this to be attained? It is to be attained, not only by prayer or by worship or by believing in God; it is to be attained by forgetting oneself in God. The belief in God is the first step. By the belief in God is attained the losing oneself in God. If one is able to do it, one has attained a power which is beyond human comprehension.
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Through the whole spiritual process what we learn is to disillusion this false ego. The annihilation of this false ego is its disillusionment. When once it is disillusioned then the true ego realizes its own merit. It is in this realization that the soul enters the kingdom of God. It is in this realization that the soul is born again, a birth which opens the doors of heaven.

Question: Is the ego completely destroyed by annihilation? Answer: The ego itself is never destroyed. It is the one thing that lives, and this is the sign of eternal life. In the knowledge of the ego there is the secret of immortality. When it is said in the Gayan, "Death dies, and life lives," it is the ego which is life, it is its false conception which is death. The false must fall away some day; the real must always be. So it is with life: the true living being is the ego; it lives. All else that it has borrowed for its use from different planes and spheres, and in which it has become lost, all that is put away Do we not see this with our own body? Things that do not belong there do not remain in it, in the blood, in the veins, anywhere. The body will not keep them, it will repel them. So it is in every sphere. It does not take what does not belong to it. All that is outside it keeps outside. What belongs on earth is kept on earth, the soul repels it. The destroying of the ego is a word; it is not destroying, it is discovering.

God's goodness is something that one cannot learn to know at once; it takes time to understand it. But little actions of kindness which we receive from those around us we can know, and we can be thankful if we want to be. In this way man develops gratefulness in his nature, and expresses it in his thought, speech, and action as an exquisite form of beauty. As long as one weighs and measures and says, "What I have done for you" and "What have you done for me," "How kind I have been to you" and "How good have you been to me," one wastes one's time disputing over something which is inexpressible in words; besides one closes by this that fountain of beauty which rises from the depth of one's heart. The first lesson that we can learn in the path of thankfulness is to forget absolutely what we do for another, and to remember only what the other person has done for us. Throughout the whole journey in the spiritual path the main thing to be accomplished is the forgetting of our false ego, so that in this way we may arrive some day at the realization of that Being whom we call God.
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This is, however, not the only intoxication. A man's absorption in the affairs of his life also keeps him intoxicated; and besides the intoxication of his work and affairs in which his mind is absorbed, there is a third intoxication, and that is the attachment that a man has to himself, the sympathy he has with himself. It is this intoxication which makes him selfish, greedy, and very often unjust towards his fellow-men. The effect of this intoxication is that a man is continually feeling, thinking, and acting with the idea in mind of what would be to his interest, what could bring him an advantage; and in this idea his whole life and all his time become fully involved. It is this intoxication that makes him say, "This one is my friend and that one is my enemy; this one is my well-wisher, but that one is against me;" and it is this intoxication that builds the ego, the false ego of man.

When the soul is evolved it feels by itself. In other words it becomes conscious of its purity, of its majesty, of its eternal life, of its bliss, of its inspiration and of its power. Such is the original mind of man and such its natural condition. It is not sin that is original but purity, the original purity of God Himself. But as the mind grows and is fed by the life in the world, unnatural things are added to it and for the moment these additions seem desirable, useful, or beautiful; they build another kind of mind which is sometimes called the ego or the false self. They make man clever, learned, brilliant, and many other things; but above and beyond all is the man of whom it can be said that he is pure-minded.

The highest perception of freedom comes when a person has freed himself from the false ego, when he is no longer what he was. All the different kinds of freedom will give a momentary sensation of being free, but true freedom is in ourselves. When one's soul is free, then there is nothing in this world that binds one; everywhere one will breathe freedom, in heaven and on earth.

Uncontrolled imaginations form the veil covering the divine light and cause darkness which produces delusion. When the will is able to scatter the clouds and allow the inner light to spread forth its rays, then there is still one more step to be taken. That is the absorption in the light: to become so lost in it that the false ego may become unconscious of itself, which in other words may be called the state of Eternal Consciousness.
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One must rise above one's likes and dislikes, for they cause much weakness in life. When one says, "I cannot stand this, I cannot eat this, I cannot drink this, I cannot bear this, I cannot tolerate, I cannot endure," all those things show man's weakness. The greater the will-power the more man is able to stand all that comes along. It does not mean that one has no choice; one can have one's choice, but when one gives in to one's choice then life becomes difficult. There is a false ego in man, called nafs by the Sufis, and this ego feeds on weakness. This ego feels vain when one says, "I cannot bear it, I do not like it, I do not look at it." All this feeds the ego and its vanity. It then thinks, "I am better than others," and thereby this ego becomes strong, and so man's weakness becomes strong. But the one who has discrimination, distinction, choice, while at the same time having these all under his control, the one who enjoys sweet but can drink a bowl of something bitter, that person has reached mastery.


The fifth aspect of the spirit is the ego, and again there are two sides to the ego: the false and the real. They are just like the two ends of one line. If we look at the line in the center, it is one line; if we look at the line on the ends, it is two ends. 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 'J." 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 'J." In the light of truth this conception is false' it is a false identity. If the hand is broken off, or a finger is separated from this body, we do not call the separate part "I," but as long as it is connected with the body we call it so. This shows that all that the false ego imagines to be its own self is not really its self.

Besides, it must be remembered that all that is composed, all that is constructed, all that is made, all that is born, all that has grown, will be decomposed and destroyed, will die and will vanish. If we identify our ego with all these things which are subject to destruction, death and decomposition, we make a conception of mortality, and we identify our soul which is immortal, we identify our self, with all that is mortal. Therefore that is the false ego.

Now coming to the most important truth about spiritual attainment: those who are thoughtful and wise, those who go into the spiritual path, do not take this path in order to perform wonders or to know curious things, to perform miracles or other wonderful things. That is not their motive; their motive is to rise above the false ego (Page 58) and to discover the real. That is the principal motive of spiritual attainment; for no one will consider it wise to be under a false impression, to be under the impression that "I exist," when one has nothing to depend upon in one's existence. Therefore 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. No sooner do we become conscious of our true being and break the fetters of the false ego, than we enter into a sphere where our soul begins to realize a much greater expansion of its own being. It finds great inspiration and power, and the knowledge, happiness and peace which are latent in the spirit.

The worship of Islam embraces in it a universal code of humility that the customs existing in all parts of the world of bowing and bending and prostrating are all devoted to the One Being only, Who alone deserves it, and no one else. The beauty in this is that, when man-the most egoistic being in creation, who keeps himself veiled from God, the Perfect Self within, by the veil of his imperfect self, which has formed his presumed ego-by the extreme humility when he stands before God and bows and bends and prostrates himself before His Almighty Being, makes the highest point of his presumed being, the head, touch the earth where his feet are, he in time washes off the black stains of his false ego, and the light of perfection gradually manifests. He stands then first face to face with his God, the idealized Deity, and when the ego is absolutely crushed, then God remains within and without, in both planes, and none exists save He.

The world is constituted, in its living beings, of egos, one ego assuming several forms and becoming several egos. Among this variety of egos everyone claims perfection, for it is the nature of the real ego within. Upon examination, this ego proves to be imperfect, for it is the imperfect division of the perfect ego. It is not perfect, yet it claims perfection in its ignorance, and longs for perfection when wise. This perfection the imperfect ego can only attain by practicing in the way of worship and of life in the world, in which he may show such humility, meekness, and gentleness that this false presumption which has formed the imperfect ego may be crushed; then what remains will be the perfect ego. Namaz is the first lesson for this attainment.
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The way to perfection for the mystic is by the annihilation of the false ego. He understands that in man there is a real ego, that this ego is divine, but that the divine ego is covered by a false ego; and every man has a false ego because it begins to grow from his birth.The mystic on the spiritual path perseveres in wiping out this false ego as much as he can, by meditation, by concentration, by prayer, by study, by everything he does. His one aim is to wipe out so much, that one day reality, which is always there buried under the false ego, may manifest. And by calling on the Name of God, in the form of prayer, or in Dhikr, or in any other form, what the mystic does is to awaken the spirit of the real ego in order that it may manifest. It is just like a spring which rises out of the rock and which, as soon as the water has gained power and strength, breaks even through stone and becomes a stream. So it is with the divine spark in man. Through concentration, through meditation, it breaks out and manifests; and where it manifests it washes away the stains of the false ego and turns into a greater and greater stream, which in turn becomes the source of comfort, consolation, healing, and happiness for all who come into contact with that spirit.

And now let us come to the mystic's vision. People think that to see colors or spirits or visions is mystical. But mysticism cannot be restricted to this, and those who see these things are not necessarily mystics. Besides those who can see and whose vision is clear, say so little about it. The mystic will be the last to claim that he sees or does wonderful things; his vision and his power would be diminished as soon as he began to feed his vanity by claiming to know or do things which others cannot know or do. The main thing that the mystic has to accomplish is to get rid of the false ego, so that if he feeds it on claiming such things he will lose all his power and virtue and greatness.

When after having gone through all the other stages of consciousness one arrives at this stage, one can speak very little; for it is beyond the stage of religion and even beyond the notion of God; it is the stage of self-expression. This stage of self-expression is reached when a person has thoroughly dug his self out, so that nothing of the self is left but only that divine substance; and only then is he authorized to express himself. Thus the tenth initiation is the awakening of the real self, the real ego, and this awakening is brought about by meditation, the meditation which makes one forget one's false or limited self. The more one is able to forget it, the more the real self awakens.
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In the Bible we read that Jesus Christ went for forty days into the desert, and that Satan was at his side. What is Satan? It is the same spirit which is the greatest enemy of the human race, the spirit of agitation. And Halima gives a symbolical, artistic, and picturesque description of an experience of the Prophet. She says that the breast of the Prophet was cut open and that some undesirable matter was removed. Symbolically this means that the spirit of agitation was taken away to make place for divine inspiration. This shows that man inherits the earthly characteristics, and among those earthly characteristics agitation is the principal one. A child sometimes shows it against its parents, a schoolboy against his friends, a youth against his companions, a grown-up person against his neighbors and everyone has a reason to justify this wrong attitude. Agitation, therefore, is the sign of the false ego, and when this false ego is broken, when this very agitation has crushed itself, just as fire burns itself out, then begins the process of purification.

The nature of a person is not the same as his false ego, but the false ego is obsessed by his nature. Everyone has brought with him on earth a certain nature, and it is not always easy to get rid of it. A lion may be trained by his keeper and may work under a certain discipline for twenty years; but one day his predisposition may be awakened and he will turn on his keeper, thus showing his nature that had been hidden; it will show that he is a lion. With all the training he has received and all the humility and surrender he has displayed, he is still a lion.

The process of mystical development is the annihilation of the false ego in the real ego. Sufis call the false ego nafs, and the real ego Allah or God. It is not that the false ego is our ego and the true ego is the ego of God; it is that the true ego, which is the ego of the Lord, has become a false ego in us. One might ask how something which is true can become false, but false and true are relative terms; in reality all is true and nothing is false. When we call something false it means that it is less true compared with that which is more true. Reality has become confused. The soul, coming from the highest source but having identified itself with a smaller domain, the domain of the body and the mind, has conceived in itself a false idea of itself; and it is this false idea which is called nafs.

In all people the ego appears in different degrees of intensity. Where it is most intense a person appears to be egoistic; the one in whom it is less pronounced seems to be unselfish. The false ego with its greater intensity becomes not only hard on others, but also on the man himself. The lion is not only cruel to other animals, but it is (Page 61) also very restless itself because of the intensity and strength of its ego, whereas the lamb is much less hard on others and therefore it is not hard on itself. All manner of trouble and torture, of deceit and treachery, of cruelty and tyranny is born of the false ego.

In its intensity the ego becomes blind, blind to justice. An intense ego is also devoid of life, and therefore of love. The man who loves himself cannot love others. A curious trick of the ego is that the egoist sees in every other person a pronounced ego. "Why has this person beautiful clothes?" "Why has he got a higher rank than I?" "Why is he  more distinguished than others? That is his continual thought. He always sees another person as having something that he ought not to have; and by this trick the false ego makes him believe that others are egoistic, when on the contrary it is he himself who is most egoistic, because his ego is hurt by the sight of the other's ego.

All the methods by which humanity tries to bring about better conditions fail if the psychology of the ego is not studied. Hardly anyone gives it a thought. In working for the construction of a new civilization many efforts are being made regardless of this principal secret of life, and in the name of reconstruction a great deal of cruelty is taking place; yet all think that they are doing it for the best for humanity. But no false ego can ever do anything for the best for humanity. One person who has risen above the false ego can do much more for the good of humanity than a thousand people blinded by their false ego, pretending to do good. Today many people, before having any idea of what to do about it, come forward and say that they want to do something good for humanity; and everybody's way of doing good is different. This may seem strange, yet if we look at life with open eyes we see a thousand examples of it. In the name of reconstruction, of bringing good to the world, of changing life's conditions, what methods people adopt! The reason is that they have begun the work of doing good too soon; one must know what kindness is before trying to be kind.

When the ego is developed still further it becomes Salima, which means peaceful. According to the mystic this is the normal state for a person to be in, though if we took that point of view we would not be able to find many normal souls! In this condition we find that the world no longer has a jarring effect on us; we are above irritation, and all manner of agitation is removed. Peace is not something that can be found outside; it is within ourselves, though it is buried under the false ego. The false ego is like the tomb of a living being, not of a corpse. The living being is buried in this tomb which is made of the thoughts of 'I' and 'myself' and 'what I am' and 'why I am so'. The life thus covered is suffocated, and there is a natural agitation, (Page 62) irritation, and unrest; for the peace which is in the depths of our being wishes to manifest to view, and the awakening of the soul depends only on the manifestation of this peace.

How many souls are searching for some outer thing that can make them spiritual: dogmas, phenomena, experiments, anything but the exploring of the self! Willing to become confused, ready to be puzzled, happy with the riddles of life, contented to go into the dark caves in order to find something! Man never values plain words, he always wants subtlety. He is pleased with something he cannot understand and thinks that it must therefore be mysticism. If one realized that spiritual development depends upon the awakening of the false ego to its true existence, its own reality, how simple the way to spiritual perfection would become! Is it not true that we make our own difficulties? Where one step is needed we would like to go a hundred steps. It is for this that the Hindus asked simple worshippers not to go directly into the temple, but to go around it a hundred times before entering, so that they felt that they had walked sufficiently to be entitled to go in.

Belief in God helps one to annihilate one's false ego; but in order to believe in God the seeker must first believe in the one who believes in God, in whom he places his confidence, in other words in his teacher. If one cannot fully believe in one's teacher one can never believe in God. That is the first step in learning to believe, and the second step is believing in the ideal. It is not necessary for the ideal to exist on earth in the form of a human being; this ideal may be in one's heart, in one's mind. And thirdly one comes to believe in God, and in that belief one loses oneself, so that God covers the believer and all there is. In this way one arrives at the perfect realization of the true ego, which is the pursuit of the mystic.

"Know thyself and thou wilt know God," said a great Sufi philosopher. To know the self is the most difficult thing in the world, because what man can perceive first is a part only of the self, a limited part. When man asks himself, "What is it in me that is l?" he finds his body and his mind, and in both he finds himself limited and apart from others. And it is this conception of his being that makes man realize himself as an individual. 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. When man in this illusion, says 'I,' in reality it is a false claim. Therefore everyone has a false claim of "I" except some who (Page 63) have arrived at a real understanding of the truth. This false claim is called in Sufi terms nafs, and the annihilation of this false self is the aim of the sage. But no doubt to annihilate this false ego is more difficult than anything else in the world, and it is this path of annihilation that is the path of the saints and the sages. One may ask, "Why should one take the trouble to annihilate the ego? Since life is full of pain and suffering why add to this suffering?"' The answer is that even if an operation will cause one suffering, it is better to endure it in order to be cured.

The training of this ego requires more care than the training of the other ego, for it is more difficult and a subtler matter to be aware of the desires of the mind and to weigh them than to be aware of and to weigh the desires of the body No doubt vanity is natural to the ego and the ego is natural to every human being. But there are desires of the mind that are necessary and there are desires of the mind that are not necessary. And the more one controls the ego the more one allows the virtues and merits that are in one's heart to manifest. This ego gives a false idea of greatness, but the effacement of this ego results in the true greatness.

The great obstacle to be overcome in meditation is the false ego or nafi. What is it that prevents us from concentrating our thoughts and feelings on God? It is the nafs. In the Hebrew religion there is the Shem or cry, "Hear, 0 Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." And there is the answer to the cry, "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind." And these directions should be considered as a unity, for the light of the soul shines in the heart and is reflected in the mind. Plato wrote that we live in a shadow world, where we confuse the shadow of ourselves with reality. This is the nafs, the false ego, which stands in the light before God, causing, so to speak, a spiritual eclipse. In meditation, one does not have to hold such a thought, for this false self is overcome through meditating upon the true self, which in reality is God. The modem devotee may repeat the Invocation, "Toward the One," etc., instead of the Shem, and it will produce the same effect. There is no difference between them in the language of the heart and soul; the forms in words may be different, but the acts, thoughts, feelings, and results are the same.

But progress does not cease there. In that state, called Fanafi-Allah, when the soul is absorbed in God, one loses the false sense of being and finds the true reality. Then one finally experiences what is termed Baqa-i-Fana, where the false ego is annihilated and merged into the true personality, which is really God expressing Himself in (Page 64) some wondrous ways. This is the same also as nirvana, where the true reality of life is experienced and expressed. This means that the true life is in God, the only Being, and through God-realization man finds his true self.

It is natural for man to worship something or someone, and as man is too proud to recognize perfection in his own kind, he looks for idols in whatever form, which in reality are dead. It is the nature of the false ego to worship what is dead, in other words what is not living; and it is the character of the true ego to recognize and worship the living. There are two kinds of pious people, one who holds high his heaven, and the other who brings heaven on earth. The former longs for something which the latter already has.

In this loss there is no loss, it is a gain. In the guise of an apparent loss, perfection is gained. That is why as much as one effaces oneself so much further one proceeds in the spiritual journey It is not so difficult as it appears to be, and yet it is difficult if one has not found the way to it. It is an attainment which is gained by someone who is firm and steady, sympathetic and self-effacing, for the whole process of the spiritual attainment is in losing the false ego for the highest gain.

But the story is one thing and the symbolism is another thing; it is a symbolism. The animal part of man is called nafs; it is the false ego. And the human part of man is called ruh; it belongs to the higher spheres. Man has two aspects. He is composed of two things: what he has borrowed from the earth, and what he has got from heaven. What is in him of heaven makes him human; what he has got of the earth is the animal part in man. What was asked of Abraham was to annihilate the nafs of his son, to make him, to prepare him for the service of God. No one can serve God fully unless that part which is called nafs, that material part, is crushed.

Therefore this sacrifice is a symbolism, a symbology, expressing the main object there is in developing the Sufi ideal, which is called fana. Fana means annihilation, the annihilation of the false ego. That is the picture. This story is a lesson to every soul, that after one has annihilated one's own false ego, then those who are devoted (Page 65) to him, those who give themselves in his guidance, to annihilate that part in them, in order that the real life may manifest to its fullness.

When Rumi speaks about the annihilation of the false ego, that is the most uplifting philosophy that one could hear. He first says that your heart is like a mirror. What generally happens is that this mirror becomes dusty. You have to wipe it to take the dust off it. In the esoteric or mystic path, the teacher shows his pupils the way of wiping this mirror so that the reflection may fall more clearly. Then he says that your worst enemy is hiding within yourself, and that enemy is your nafs or false ego. It is very difficult to explain the meaning of the word false ego. The best I can do is to say that every inclination which springs from disregard of love, harmony, and beauty and which is concerned with oneself and unconcerned with all others is the false ego.

The false ego is a false god; when the false god is destroyed, the true God arrives.

The true ego is born of the ashes of the false.

Self-will is the strength of the spirit; but when the false ego expresses self-will, a soul, instead of rising, fails. The spirit becomes entitled to have self-will when the soul is evolved. "Blessed are the poor in spirit."

The false ego is the shadow of the body seen in the sky, not the reflection of the soul.

Throughout the whole journey on the spiritual path, the main thing that has to be accomplished is the forgetting of the false ego.






Awakening Through the Planes

First Edition, July 1998


The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in March 1997 at  the Abode of the Message, New Lebanon, New York. Material froma a privately published monograph, The Developmental Stages (c) 1997, was also used, as well as Keeping in Touch #100. It updates material found in Consciousness and teh Planes (c) 1995.

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Zarifah Sander-Manzella and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner.Awakening Through the Planes

 (Page 1) 
Prologue: The Quest for Awakening


Precariously sheltered under what remained of the roof of a shepherd's shed, after a stormy night in the mountains, the thunder recedes with the clouds, swept in hot pursuit by the raging wind. In resonance, my consciousness melts away, eluding my grasp, 'gone with the wind,' scattering into the edgeless universe -- with it all my concepts about the world, the cosmos, my circumstances, unresolved problems, about values pursued, appropriate actions, Divine qualities, my mental constructs about the meaningfulness of life, egos, bodyness, the psyche -- all these emotionally loaded thoughts appear so futile, so worthless, so misleading. However, facing the mental collapse, I cleave to the very meaningfulness that shattered my commonplace thinking, instead of just floundering in the dark night of negativity. It is a consummate quantum leap.

There's pain and joy and also peace and ecstasy in my realization. Yes, what to do is awaken from one perspective to another, to discover my cosmic dimension--awakening beyond life, and now awakening in life.
When the unreality of life pushes against my heart, its door opens to the reality.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Our concern is reconciling our quest for awakening beyond the middle range mentality and our psychological and physical needs, to which we are conditioned by our present day civilization. Owing to the stress to which we are being subjected in the world at present, more and more people are in need of psychological counsel, and the more farsighted psychotherapists are helping their patients to incorporate in their ego the wider areas of their psyche hitherto unknown to them. Therapy is enhanced by creativity. Therefore we wish to make use of the insights gained by contemplatives exploring the no-man's lands of human understanding to galvanize the fulfillment reached in the flowering of our being and our accomplishment in order to build a better world.

We wish to find a way of personal freedom, and help free others, while being deeply committed in our responsibilities. This could result in an emotional tug of war involving our self-esteem, being lured by the comfort and material support system offered by our civilization and its amazing technologies, and our needs for authenticity, and for freedom from dependence and conditioning. Compromise would prove to be a weak palliative--a failure to live up to our imperative motivations. The wager is finding freedom in our thinking while accepting constraint in our circumstances owing to our responsibilities. 

My objective is to explore the steps in a developmental process of ego formation and devise the skills which must be operative in order to upgrade it, lured by our spiritual (Page 2) idealism. In this study, we will explore methods of meditation to enhance the skill of the ego. We start with our reliance upon the reactive, acquisitive personal ego's strategies, then we wean ourselves from these to call upon our latent potentials, eventually upgrading the ego, and hence our self-esteem, pollinating it with transcendent values as we progress step-by-step in the sequence of developmental stages of the formative processes of the ego.

 The Developmental Stages 

The developmental stages in spiritual growth correspond to the levels described by the dervishes. They prove effective in gradually weaning the adept from resorting to the strategy of the ego, substituting potential resources. The adept arouses these resources by awakening to them, while alternately awakening to them by arousing them. Awakening represents a transit of consciousness, from the restrictive personal consciousness into its two dimensions: the cosmic embrace and the transcendent, which strikes us as the antipodal point of view to our own--the Divine point of view.

Of course there are emotional issues and our emotions give a clue or provide criteria about the developmental stage which we are in. We need to have an overview over the whole process of developmental stages, the lie of the land. Then we need to be able to identify the problems and see how they correspond. So really speaking, we would need an Infobase procedure and include pertinent sayings of Pir-o-Murshid, other Sufis, or other teachers which concur with the insight that we are gaining while working on this awakening.

We have in Sufism very clear data regarding the developmental stages at least for spiritual growth. They may not correspond with the developmental stages outlined by psychotherapists, but I think they are complementary and I'm sure they can enrich each other. We need to experience each of these stages in our own realization and attunement. Otherwise it's just theory and just words. In view of our concern to offer more experiential, rather than theoretical guidelines, we are articulating it::

1.  By relating personal experiences in the course of a retreat.

2.  In formulating instructions as they arise from the experience with a view to showing how the experience can be primed.

3.  By bringing to light theories comparing modes of thinking.

4.  By quoting contemplatives; it is sometimes heartening to see our experience corroborated.

5.  By bearing in mind throughout, our objective to investigate what effect each new perspective and the ensuing realization has on improving our ego's ability to deal with problems encountered in real-life situations. 

So far we've been giving the answers without asking the questions. Now, we need to ask the question, "What is it that people need? We need to unfurl the potentialities of our beings, and (Page 3) reach something we may not even believe that we could ever reach, which we like to call illumination or awakening. Yet its a gradual process of awakening. Were basing our orientation on the words of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan:
I hear a cry of humanity and the Message is an answer.

 The Cosmic Embrace 

The cosmic dimension consists in seeing ourselves as holistically part of the totality of the cosmos. This is very challenging because it requires us to question our commonplace personal self-image, so as to be aware of the fact that we partake potentially of the bounty of the cosmos, gaining a sense of our cosmic identity, while not losing our personal uniqueness.

I think the most vulnerable aspect of ourselves is our self-image. There is no doubt the advent of psychology has played a part in drawing our attention to the fact that many have deep psychological problems. Although we don't have the expertise of a psychotherapist, we are proposing alternative or complementary solutions which answer not just the psychological needs or the human needs of people, but our spiritual needs. Of course, it's very difficult to define what these are, but we're gradually becoming a little clearer as to that kind of nostalgia in the human being--the ultimate value. Whatever words we use, like sacredness, that's not very important. The important thing is that we validate and honor that ideal, as Pir-o-Murshid says about the horizon: 

The further you advance, the further it recedes. So you can never really touch it.

Eventually, in a further step, we will be transmuting our ego by the power and splendor of transcendent levels of our being. In its first stage, this transit needs to be conducted expertly, step-by-step, to eschew withdrawal symptoms which would endanger our self-confidence until we discover and identify with our cosmic dimension, placing our reliance upon it rather than relying upon the personal dimension of our ego for our self-confidence. The transit is triggered off by seeing things we first assessed from the personal viewpoint, in ever new perspectives of insight, eventually discovering further levels of our being. 

For example, a person treats us in a patronizing fashion, which violates any acceptable sense of propriety, and hurts our self-esteem which is already vulnerable. Or, a person manages by stealth to rob us of our inheritance, or simply robs us. Or, a person undermines us by maligning us with blatant lies. There are cases of psychological and sexual abuse. If we look deeper, to see what is behind that action, we find it is a feature of the strategy of that person's ego, which is parading a bloated display of his/her self-image, and which carries contradictory personal valuations of which he/she is not too sure.

To protect our self-esteem that has been slighted, we are programmed with a very understandable strategy of countering back aggressively. While we need to learn to put that person in his/her place (which is healthy for him/her), the chances are that (Page 4) he/she will respond in anger, and the feud can escalate, and we will have intensified further aggressiveness in the person who violated our sense of dignity in the first place. This may reverberate to and fro in counterchain reactions. If, however, we had not reacted, we would have lost a lot of self-esteem (unless we are locked into an impasse where, being frustrated by not doing something to give satisfaction to our anger, we may become cantankerous, harbor self-pity, or take it out on others unreasonably). We not only resent the abuser, but resent ourselves for condoning abuse, while in fact we were deprived from taking action.

The unconscious disregards the logic of our conscious mind and wallows in ambiguous contradictions. The ego, in its frustration, tries out inadequate strategies. Resentment at being abused is the driving force of the ego's strategy to protect the crux of our effectiveness as a human being. Notice here the common pattern of vendettas and wars. We get inveigled into a vicious circle. The samsaric wheel whirls repetitively. How do we opt out of that imbroglio?

The programming of the ego offers several strategies. The primary strategy is reactive, but this does not enlist all the resourcefulness of our being. It represents that function in our programming whose effectiveness is in dealing with emergencies. The short-circuit firing of brain neurons will not enlist the wisdom of the brain's sophisticated effectiveness, when umpteen neural networks operate in concert holistically.

Therefore we ask, "What are the skills that enable us to avail ourselves of all our resources?" We want skills which not only protect our self-esteem when it is under attack, but also enhance it by upgrading our ego. The clue is, of course, in the field of emotion. Resentment brews in circumstances where we are frustrated by having our hands tied, preventing us from taking action. Aggressiveness is a way of giving satisfaction to our resentment. Anger pulls us into the whirlpool of our personal identity where we neglect the wider outreach of our being.

What solution does spirituality offer? Meditation practice will only prove effective if fostered by a radical resolve, which could prove to be an undaunted about-turn. We ask ourselves, "Do I wish to continue reacting to challenges in the manner which I have inherited from my evolutionary conditioning, or am I in pursuit of excellence? Dare I intervene courageously, even at personal risk, like a knight, without resentment?" We remember the words of Christ: "They know not what they do." Is that an acceptable argument? Can evil be whitewashed as mental pathology? 

We cannot discount the crass callousness of the primitive egoistic instinct, but the despot will try to draw us into his/her battlefield where, if we are not equipped with an equally ruthless ego, we are predictably the loser. It is below the dignity of the dervish to be annoyed by people's ego games. He/she feels outrage (which is cosmic rather than personal) at impropriety, rather than allowing him/herself to slip into rage at being hurt personally. He/she calls upon the Divine quality of sovereignty, which is lying in wait in the seedbed of his/her being, in his/her Divine heritage.

To be able to proceed thus, we need to shift our sense of identity, from being a discrete person to acquiescing that we carry those features which we laud when we project them upon God. We acquiesce that they are in ourselves, in the features of (Page 5) our Divine heirloom; thus we awaken them. To intensify this realization, the dervishes repeat as a mantram the Ism'illahi:  ya Qader -- or  ya Wali -- Allah ho Akbar.

What does Christ mean by being not of the world, or the kingdom of God? It could be discovered by enlisting the power of our super-ego -- a power the dervishes call the Divine power -- rather than calling upon anger from the personal dimension of our ego.

The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. It is not that the false ego is our ego, and the true ego is the ego of God, it is that the true ego, which is the ego of God, has been reduced to a false ego in us. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Will meditation lead to that transit? Or, better still, a retreat? What meditation, what are the steps, what are the skills required? What skills do we need to transit from resorting to the strategy of the commonplace ego into what is often represented as living up to the ideal of nobility and splendor and enlightenment?
 (Page 6) 
Nasut

Nasut, according to the Sufis, is the ordinary state in which we, along with most people, find ourselves. We think of ourselves as the subject who is observing the world as the object. We are in a state of dependence. Carrying a grudge, we misinterpret situations. That's the bottom line or station. 

Psychotherapists know there are very deep needs which account for our assessment of our problems. One is dependence. It's very complicated. Not just dependence upon a house or food or a job. But dependence upon people, or the opinion of people, or the support of people. It's that we have not been weaned totally from our parents, so we have not grown up yet. Pir-o-Murshid makes a very clear distinction between being self-sufficient and being needy, having the need for acquisition. We are enriching our being by our interface with the environment, physiologically and psychologically enriching ourselves. So we are needy. We are in a state of dependence. There is psychological dependence and addiction. 

In a way it is very gratifying to be able to discover our freedom from dependence. Consequently that's one of the practices of the Yogis. They are systematically freeing themselves from dependence upon heat, or putting up with the cold, or not having a shelter, or dependence upon the safety of not being attacked by animals. It gives us a power that we couldn't possibly have if we were still dependent. If we are dependent, we need to wean ourselves from that dependence. We sometimes seek in a guru the parent, somebody upon whom we can depend. Of course the guru's job is to free us from him/herself, but it's got to be done in slow stages. That's what's called weaning.

The mature person is self-sufficient. We're moving from infancy into maturity. In a state of infancy we are dependent, then gradually we become self-sufficient. The weaning is painful. The word for self-sufficiency is Mughni. When I say Mughni, I think to myself Mu means the magi, the magus. There is a sense that those are beings who have found self-sufficiency. At the end of a retreat I was doing in Shiraz, I went into the cellar where they had photos of dervishes from the old days. It was really extraordinary. The faces were like those of the magi; they were like the kings of old. Miracles do happen. The magi make miracles happen. Perhaps the greatest miracle is that the human being can be transformed. 

 The Steps 

Ordinarily we identify with our body, our thoughts or emotions, or our self-image. If I judge situations from the point of view of what they mean to me, to my psyche, I am biased, and will react by resorting to the defensive reflex of the ego's built-in strategy. Our self-referential judgment is somewhat flawed by mental associations and emotions. Ordinarily we are not aware of the extent to which our thinking is conditioned. Our notion of objects and situations is subject to the ordinary mode of reflecting upon them; our understanding is constrained by the meanings articulated in our verbal thinking. 
 (Page 7) 
As a first step toward upgrading our ego's performance, we learn to consider our body, psyche, and thoughts as (somewhat) 'other.' They have accrued to us in our existential condition, and as such, can be looked upon as objects of our perception. Consequently something, in the rudimentary stages, is gained by thinking, "I am a consciousness in a body experiencing other." The 'other' could be the physical world, the thoughts or emotions expressed by people (in conversations or radio, television, press), or the personality of people.

We find that, to start with, people have a need for the attachment, such as the attachment of the child to the mother. Of course, more generally, there are several aspects of this problem. We are endowed with a rather simplistic defense mechanism to protect our vulnerability, called the ego strategy. When we are attacked, we attack and so on. That's a reactive process. Of course, this strategy can lead us into trouble. For example, when we can't counterattack, we lose our self-esteem, so we can't win. Therefore, as we evolve, we learn to wean our dependence on that perfunctory strategy by gradually bringing in self-esteem. In India, the elephants don't like the agitation of chickens, but they learn to withstand that agitation by what the Hindus call Vairagya, which is indifference. Actually this indifference is a defense mechanism. It's not the same defense mechanism as attack. It would be stupid for the elephant to attack the chickens, it wouldnt make sense, so the elephants find a strategy that will work. The reason the elephant is able to maintain indifference is because the elephant has higher self-esteem than the chickens. 

Self-esteem is very vulnerable. As long as we are dependent on our attachment (attachment and dependence are very close together), then our self-esteem is very vulnerable. We depend on being loved. Yes, the child needs the mother's care, needs to know he/she is being loved and is in a safe environment. Should this fail, which happens in children who don't receive the love and care of their parents, then those children look for somebody who can provide that love. 

There is a transfer as we become adults; we seek partnership. At this stage we seek to be loved. We do not yet clearly feel the need to love, just the need to be loved. If that partnership breaks down, which is often the case in our modern society, then of course, we transfer that need for love to a father figure or a mother figure. There is that need until we outgrow that need, so the weaning has to be done in slow stages. If we wean too fast, there are withdrawal symptoms. We have a need to be loved. It's only at a later stage that we have a need to love. Therefore, Pir-o-Murshid said, "They are tested in their love."
As we evolve in the developmental stages, we reach ultimately a stage of independence, of detachment. Pir-o-Murshid says, "independence and indifference are the two wings that enable the heart to fly." 

These are the kind of things we find amongst ascetics. (It's not at all our intention to make people ascetics.) I think the great challenge in spirituality in our time is to learn how to introduce the defense mechanism of detachment and independence in the middle of our commitment in life. It's very difficult to reconcile those two. On (Page 8) the other hand, where there is distress and abandonment there is meaning, because it is clear we need attachment. However, to evolve we need to be weaned from that attachment. Somehow, we need to become adult and less dependent even if our heart is vulnerable.

At first dependence is a further feature of attachment at the Nasut level when we are in our perfunctory, commonplace way of thinking and feeling. We are very much in the body consciousness. We are dependent upon comfort or body well-being and gratification of body pleasure and basic instinct, including the instinct of reproduction and the need for a family unit. Things like that are very basic. However, as in the Hindu tradition, when we are at the end of our life, we can reach the point of independence. So, body consciousness and instinct, all this, is the scaffolding we need to start with. 

Pir-o-Murshid makes a distinction between self-sufficiency and the need for complementarity. The ideal is self-sufficiency. In the meantime there is dependence. However, the flip side of that is dependence becomes addiction very easily. Addiction to drugs, to tobacco, addiction to alcohol, to rock and roll, to music. We have a kind of dependence upon conditions that are favorable to growth. We think we really need those conditions for growth. It may be true, but the Yoga tradition is that people leave their homes, and expose their bodies to heat and cold and hunger and the hazards of the jungle and the weather, having no proper house, like the homeless.

Bear in mind that we have to become dependent, and dependence does take away our sense of self-sufficiency. If that's the ultimate goal, then where is the breakup point? Is it in what Pir-o-Murshid calls "the difference between need and greed?" For each person its different, but we know very well how needs can escalate. "Well, I need this and I need that." We become the custodians of our property. It's a balance we need to find. Spirituality is the quest for what has often been called another kingdom by Christ: "They are in the world but not of the world." It's very difficult to reconcile those two needs, but we are doing it. 

At some point we have to ask ourselves very clear questions. What is it we really value in life? Then see whether, as Shihabuddin Surwardhi says, "the support system takes over." We do all the things we need so we are able to reach our ideal, yet we may never reach our ideal because it takes so much to do the things that are needed as a support system. The same applies to the Sufi way in, for example, the use of the Dhikr. People are dependent upon a church to become high. We have a need for a support system even for the sacred, but the Sufis were nomads so they could not rely upon a church. Therefore, they had to build a temple out of their own body. That's the reason for the Dhikr.

I'm making a distinction between attachment and dependence. We are attached to the need to love. It is only at the end of the journey that we find self-sufficiency and that means total freedom. That was Buddha's quest, but on the way we are still dependent upon all those elements that accrue to us from outside to enrich us. 

It's not just dependence upon food or comfort or those kinds of things, but our exchange with kindred human beings who have similar aspirations and thoughts and (Page 9) emotions. There is a mutual enrichment there, and consequently, there are people who are lonely because that need for dependence is not satisfied for whatever reason. It might be that we have alienated ourselves from other people, and at the same time have a need to foster an exchange with people. Still there's a contradiction there. There are a lot of contradictions in human nature, in the unconscious. 

 Extending Consciousness and Vantage Point 

The wazifa ya Wadud means Divine love. It means our love for a person is somehow loving God, even if we don't quite realize that what we love is God. We see God through the picture of a person. If we go to a Yoga school, they give us a picture of the guru and a candle. We have a candle and flowers and that's our altar. That's Tasawwuri Murshid. Tasawwuri means picture. In Islam this brings about the destruction of idols. It's nothing new because, in the old traditions at least, they used to destroy the idols and then build another one. The Tibetans do that; they create their beautiful mandalas and then they destroy them. 

The meaning takes place right there in translating from Tasawwuri Murshid to Tawajeh, which means getting into the consciousness of the murshid. The beauty is that all the masters, saints, and prophets of all the great religions are our teachers. We are not limited to a guru. That's wonderful, to be able to choose our guru amongst the masters, then try and visit one, and then another one. Of course we project what we would like our guru to be. Still it is because we see in that teacher something in us and it helps us to discover ourselves. By seeing ourselves in another, we are better able to manifest what we are in ourselves.

The next step is really the breakthrough. We really get into the consciousness of a master, prophet or saint and imagine what it is like. We might say, "I can't do that," but we can. That master is really like the archetype of the exemplar that is in us, so we discover ourselves, not in another us, but in the archetype of ourselves. This capacity we have to always imagine a larger number than the largest number we've imagined, or a more perfect quality than the qualities we've experienced in ourselves, this is the secret of the wazifa, it leads us into extending our sense of a quality beyond the known quality we see in people and in ourselves. 

Wadud is a rather simplistic formula, like, "God is love." It gets to a point when we know it is an extraordinary thing to be in love. All our faculties are enhanced tremendously. We start being alive, being in love with love regardless of a person. It's the most wonderful thing in the world. That's what the Sufis call ecstasy. If attachment is love, then the ultimate expression of attachment is Divine love and the ecstasy of Divine love. It's a kind of magic. Otherwise we get caught in our humdrum routine of everyday life, rather dull, rather disheartening. What's the point if I continue to be what I have always been? We entertain an ideal, then we dont even believe in it anymore because we have been deceived so many times. It takes a lot of courage to keep on believing in our ideal, not formulating it in words, but beyond what we could ever conceive of. 

A person might say, "I've been badly cheated by this person and I'm angry and I have resentment. I've been to a psychotherapist. Of course the psychotherapist (Page 10) confirmed that I have been abused. So I feel damaged." The crux of the question is that the person is looking at things from his/her personal vantage point. The consciousness of the universe is present within the personal vantage point and it is subsumed, latent. It is potential. It's important to draw to our attention right at the start that it is there. Otherwise there is a danger of getting encapsulated in our personal vantage point, not realizing the tremendous expanse and the content of that vantage point. In other words, it's something like learning music. It's good to start with scales, but it's good to play a little bit of Chopin, even at the scale level, because we can see where we're going instead of being stuck where we are at present. 

There are two wazaif (plural of wazifa) that apply. There is Basit, which is expanding, outreach, ya Basit. A very good illustration of that is, first of all, our glance. We can look at letters on the page of a book or we can look at a panorama; that's a very clear description of the way our glance can expand. The same is true of our consciousness, but for this to be real, we have to test out if we are able to experience what it would be like to be another person. It's very difficult, but we can get into the consciousness of another person. That's not telepathy; that would be indiscreet. It's getting into the attunement of that person and seeing the place from which that person comes. 

Consequently this is the first stage when Sufis say, "I see him/her from his/her vantage point." We actually say, "I see him/her through his/her eyes." The other one is, "I see myself through his/her eyes." When I see myself through the eyes of the person who is opposing me, I realize the other person has a conception of me which does not concur with my conception of myself. That's why the person is treating me the way he/she is. It doesn't mean his/her conception is better than mine or that mine is better then his/hers. They are both relative and inadequate, incomplete. Then we can expand our consciousness into that of more people, because there are always more and more people involved in what we think is our problem. Ultimately we realize what we thought was our problem is the problem of humanity, we realize it doesn't have a frontier; it doesn't have boundaries. It involves the problems of all people. It's not my problem; it's my participation in the problem of the universe, in the drama of the universe. Looking at it from our point of view is totally inadequate. If we start getting into the consciousness of more and more people, we're beginning to see the whole significance of what we think are our problems. Basit indicates an expansion of our consciousness and, as a consequence, our self-image and our assessment of our problems. 

Some of the wazaif make us aware of something in ourselves and then we have a different assessment of our problems. Instead of saying situations or occurrences are incongruous, random, we suspect there is some kind of sense behind them. We see the hoax will be unmasked. We see there are values at stake. For example, in politics the values of freedom and honesty are at stake. Those are the issues in politics. In our situations, too, there are issues. 

Ya Wazi means encompassing, so there is some kind of containment, but it's embracing. The important difference is that in Basit there is a tendency to lose ourselves in infinity and overstress our outreach. We need to consider our intentions when we are meditating. We do this by asking very clear questions like, "What are my values?" (Page 11) and "Am I pursuing my values or just giving lip service because it is not real?" The next question is, "What need I do to pursue my values?" Then ask, "Why am I doing what I'm doing?" Ask very clear questions. 

As we turn within the attention is on ourselves rather than situations. We can see the impact we have on a situation; otherwise we think we are the victim of the situation. In fact, it's very easy to see the impact of the situation upon us, like, "My life is so hard that consequently I've developed resentment," or, "I've developed anger," or, "I've developed a sense of disenchantment or bitterness." We think we are the victim of a situation outside. Looking at it the other way around, how does our being affect the environment? It's not so simple to do that, because our being is in a process of unfurling, and as it unfurls we discover new ways we can impact the environment. 
 (Page 12) 
Khayal

The next stage, called Khayal, is really the state in which we are a little bit clearer in our mind, because in the initial stage there is confusion between what we think is our consciousness and the subject. The knowing subject is what we call Shahid, the witness.

It is really important to make that next step which is looking at the events and realizing we are looking at them through the vantage point of our psyche, that we are projecting our psyche upon events-in psychological terms, asking, "What does this mean to me?" instead of "What does it mean?" 

The view of the Sufis is that circumstances, qualities, and idiosyncrasies are clues to reality. Instead of discarding them, we see that they are media through which we might be able to reach reality that is trying to transpire through that which appears; let us say, that which is enacted through the drama of our life. This is the Sufi point of view. To understand Sufism, we have to know we are always seeing things from two anti-polar standpoints at the same time, the personal and the impersonal--what is called the Divine point of view, the anti-polar point of our own personal point of view. That gives a sort of dynamic to our point of view. If we think from just one point of view, our point of view is limited. If we are able to extrapolate between those two points of view, it gives us a whole new picture, a very rich picture of reality. 

What do we know about God? At the first stage, we wish to know God. Then at the second stage, we discover God through the clues that are found in the situations and idiosyncrasies in our lives. They are clues, that which transpires behind that which appears. This goes very deep. Because somehow the thought of whether God exists or not, or thoughts with regard to God, are very enigmatic in people who will not believe in God simply because we tell them to believe in God. Today that doesn't work anymore, so now we need a new paradigm. 

What do we mean by clues? Remember the movie E.T. the Extraterrestrial? Do we mean to say we were crying and laughing because we saw shadows on the screen? Those were shadows, and yes, they represented E.T. When we hear that E.T. had the voice of an old lady and the face of a turtle, we wonder if we haven't been fooled; no, because we saw E.T. through the eyes of that child, so it was very real for us. Really what Speilberg was doing was conveying his thought by means of devices. We could say God is conveying His/Her intention through devices. The devices are clues as to what that intention is. We never know the intention, but the devices will lead toward that intention. For example, if we see the pug marks of a bear in the snow, we haven't seen the bear; if we follow those pug marks, we might find the bear. That's what we mean by clues. 

Instead of discounting the physical world as being illusory, as the Hindus do (maya), it is seen as a very valid indication of reality. In fact, the Sufis go further than that. They say God is absent there, present here. God becomes a reality in existence. Prior to that, or without that, God is a potentiality. Now that's a very revolutionary (Page 13) way of looking at it, but it has enormous consequences because it means we have to make that potentiality actuated in ourselves in order to know God. 

At first we think of God as other, then we realize we can only know God by discovering and by following the clues in our own selves. That's why Pir-o-Murshid says, "Make God a reality." The teaching of Pir-o-Murshid is very concrete, very tangible. 

 Thinking as the Object of our Cognizance 

We would like to unfurl our being, but we need to remove obstacles such as guilt and resentment. To say we have a faulty assessment of our situation or our problems is not good enough. At first we were considering situations. We were considering our personality, our idiosyncrasies, even the seedbed of our personality, the potentialities. Now we've reached a stage in our meditation where our thinking is the object of our cognizance. Instead of observing the outer world, or thinking of the circumstances, or of our self-image, were scrutinizing our thinking. Thoughts are very illusive, because our thoughts are conditioned to a very large extent to not let us easily unmask the hoax of our thinking. It requires a lot of perspicacity and skill to see the way our thoughts carry conviction. The consequence is they can stand in the way of our work with ourselves to unfurl our being.

What I'm saying is we are carrying a false assessment of our problems, schlepping it through our lives without realizing that it is in ourselves, in our thinking, that we are carrying a faulty assessment which stands in the way of the unfurling of our being. The outer world, not just the physical world and circumstances, continues to live in our psyche. When we turn within, we find them inside. The physical world continues to live at the psychological level, including, furthermore, a faulty assessment of our own self-image. What is much more serious is that we are carrying this faulty assessment in our psyche and are convinced that's the way things are throughout our life. 

Concentrate on our cognizance, our mode of thinking. What conclusion would our mind come to if we tried to prescribe for ourselves a quality we would need to develop in order to meet a problem? The conclusion we arrive at is we can't count upon our decision as to the kind of quality we need because of the limitation of our thinking, and because it's seen from our ego point of view. Remember these words of Pir-o-Murshid because they are very important: "What we call the ego is a faulty assessment of who we are."He says the real ego is God. He is not using the ego in a pejorative sense in the least. It's just that it's distorted in our own self-image. If we stay in that format, thinking of ourselves as a subject that is observing situations, observing our personality and our qualities from the personal vantage point, we can be sure we are looking at things from our personal bias, that's how we start. Normally that's how we start if we're meditating. 

Now we start to turn within and we come across a very different mode of thinking. When we consider outside, everything seems to be made of discrete entities, our thoughts. We think in categories. Even most of our words are static words instead of dynamic words. For example, there is no such a thing as thoughts, but there is such a thing as thinking. So we cut up the process of thinking into categories.
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When we turn within, we find a new mode of thinking that we're not familiar with. This is the implicate mode of thinking according to Dr. David Bohm. Every thought is connected with every other. In fact, we can say every thought, every stream of thinking is interwoven with every other stream of thinking. We get lost. Exactly as if we were to watch radio waves on the screen, we would never make sense of them. The radio or the TV somehow reduces the amount of waves so we can make sense of them; it acts as a transducer. That's what our mind does, it reduces our thinking to satisfy the simplistic mind. If we meditate, we want to learn how to think, we are learning modes of thinking we are not familiar with.

The fact is, consciousness can be expanded from within instead of from without. That is, reaching out instead of encompassing without. Consequently what we need to do when we turn within is to alter our sense as the subject, as the knower, as the spectator. The wazifa is Shahid--the witness. Quoting Saint Francis of Assisi, "I thought I was looking at the world, but the world was looking at me." He is saying the witness now is not the ego sense of my personal self as a witness, but it is the universe that is looking at itself through me. Saint Francis said, "The world is looking at me." Ibn' Arabi (who lived at about the same time) said, "God is discovering Himself through my eyes." It's not just that the universe is looking at itself; it's discovering itself through us. It's a much more dynamic way of looking at things.

What we are introducing here is a notion of God. If we just keep the notion of being the Shahid, the witness, then we can't get anywhere. We have two dimensions, two poles, of Shahid. At first we expand. We could say, Shahid -- Basit, consciousness expanding. Or we could say, Shahid -- Wazi, which means consciousness being all-encompassing. Then when we're turning within, we could say Shahid -- Batin, that is consciousness working from within. 

The danger in meditating, as we turn within, is to continue thinking of ourselves as a subject observing an object other than ourselves. We think of our self as subject-object antinomy. While we observe the physical world, we can see a clear distinction between ourselves as a subject and what we're experiencing. When we turn within, the antinomy between subject and object is not that clear anymore, because we are at the same time the spectator and that which we are observing.

The first thing to do is, as we say in psychology, to get in touch with our feelings. A lot of people, particularly men, have a problem getting in touch with their feelings. It's below our dignity to be too sentimental about feelings, so to acquiesce, those feelings color our assessment of problems and ourselves. It's not that the mind is deceiving as much as our feelings are hurt and we feel bad about something, so we try to hide it, mask it. We are really casting the light of truth within the dark unconscious and bringing the unconscious to the surface so we can deal with it. If we bring a deep sea fish to the surface, its all bloated. It's not the same as a deep sea fish. So there is some fallacy there. 


What Yoga is doing and what Buddhism is doing and what Sufism is doing is casting the light of awareness into the unconscious instead of retrieving elements from the unconscious and bringing them to the surface. What we are really doing when we are turning within is plunging into the unconscious. We have to lose ourselves (Page 15) as the witness. Otherwise there is some incongruity. Somehow the witness is diluted in the unconscious instead of being able to watch the unconscious. 

To become aware of our feelings, we need a different kind of Shahid, a different kind of witness. I could say perhaps the heart is the witness now instead of the mind. We have to start by working with our personal consciousness and then reach into this deeper sense of consciousness that is not personal but allows the consciousness of the whole universe to come through. That would be Shahid--Batin. 

 Transmuting Our Problems 

Now we have something to work with, so when we're meditating we don't just keep regurgitating our problems. It doesn't lead to anything. We ask: "What are the issues?" Instead of rejecting impressions that we feel are disturbing, we are able to transform them in our being, transmute them in our being and take them in, and that will enrich us. 

We think of very specific cases where something very disturbing keeps on bugging us when meditating. For example, we keep on thinking about this mean person who is disturbing us and we think it's such a pity. Things could be wonderful. There's always the same trouble continuing. Now we wonder, "How can I transmute that situation?" First of all we get into the consciousness of that person, and then where that person is coming from. There was a time when I was at the United Nations and I heard all those lovely speeches and thought about what was behind them. 

To transmute there is a wazifa, ya Latif. Latif means subtle; it's really very much like what happens with flowers when they become perfume. It's a process where we extract the gist and we reject the contingent aspect. There is no doubt that in the process of digestion there's rejection of a lot of elements that are expelled from the body. We have to make that shift. Making this shift is the only way in which we can extract the essence of that situation.
We have several terms dependence, independence, codependence--a notion that has gotten really out of hand. It leads to utter selfishness; I don't want to help anybody because I would be codependent. If they need their whiskey, they need their whiskey. They've become dependent upon it. We would like to wean them from it, so give them a little less every day, but keep giving them a little bit. Codependence is a very dangerous notion that leads to utter selfishness.

Then there is the notion of interdependence that is much more acceptable than independence. It's rather presumptuous to think we can be independent. In interdependence, we are dependent upon a person and that person depends upon us. We are helping each other. That's a much more satisfactory notion. Therefore if we are suffering from bereavement, which can lead to a sense of loneliness (it's not the same thing as aloneness), we need to give to another person instead of just wanting to receive from another person. People who are lonely are people who want to receive. If we give, then there is interdependence. 
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There is a magical word, Muqit, which is the meaning of charity. That's giving, giving a smile so a person feels we care for him/her. Of course that gets into this very personal question, the need to be loved or the need to love. There again if we just have a need to be loved, we are demanding something. If we have a need to love, then we are not demanding anything from anybody. That's self-sufficiency. That will make us independent. That will make us at least free from our dependence. 

We all have met people, and somehow we like or we don't like them. There is a sign it's not judgment. It's much deeper than judgment, it has to do with emotional attunement. There is something about this person I don't like. I don't know what it is, but after shaking hands with that person, I want to wash my hands. Maybe the person's hands were perfectly clean. It just has to do with a kind of emotion. We have that sensitivity. The wazifa Mujib means to be sensitive. We are very sensitive, and there are emotions in us that we don't like. It's not just in others; it's the same kind of feeling we have about others that we have about ourselves. 

Yet isolation is a very dangerous thing. A lot of people think that which leads toward unity and toward discovering God is to isolate oneself from the grossness of the world. Pir-o-Murshid said the person who thinks he/she is a special person because he/she can't bear the grossness of the world is simply not up to dealing with it. It's not a particular quality we can pride ourselves on, that we can't stand the grossness of people. We isolate ourselves and then don't realize we suffer from loneliness because we isolate ourselves. 

The only way to overcome that loneliness is to learn to give instead of just wanting to receive, and that means sensitivity to how the other people feel. Consider the conversations of people. We find they just want to talk about themselves. I remember Pir-o-Murshids in India; they were always interested in other people. They were interested in me or in other people whom I introduced. They would never speak about themselves; whereas in our ordinary conversations, people just speak about themselves. Sensitivity makes for real exchange. 

Ya Mujid, is to be sensitive to the pain of people instead of just thinking of our own pain. I would combine it with Rahman or Rahim. They have very different meanings. Ya Rahim is suffering with. That is the real meaning of compassion. Only if we are really sensitive to the suffering of people can we develop that heart quality which makes us endearing and will therefore foster the exchange between us and other people. If we love people we have a warm heart. If we don't have a warm heart, we shouldn't be surprised if people shun us and ostracize us. They don't feel we really care for them. That's ya Rahim. It seems very simple, but it's a way of helping people get out of the feeling of loneliness and honoring the need for dependence.

Rahman is a different word altogether because Rahman is a kind of generosity, a kind of magnanimity, there is room in our hearts for people we dislike. That's magnanimity. That goes together with a sense of the vastness of our being, expanding not just our consciousness and our self-image, but expanding our heart so it embraces. It is very easy to love people who are admirable, but to love people who are even pernicious, shockingly so, and yet love them, that's really a hard exercise. 
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When we have really felt a resonance with the sufferings of people, it is difficult to find happiness in the kind of situations in which we find ourselves amongst people. We feel we are being disloyal to our loyalty for the suffering of those people by being happy. I'm thinking of the case of someone who was very shattered by the terrible ordeal his family was put through by the Nazis. Our sensitivity becomes very deeply damped by the terrible cruelty of people. It is difficult to force ourselves to be happy. It's very dangerous for us to think that we have to fix it, to think if a person is unhappy, "Let's give him/her a wazifa like ya Azim, and make him/her happy." It doesn't work that way. It's the other way around. We can't force ourselves to shift from disenchantment to enchantment by will, or by a wazifa, or by the good advice of the leader and guide.

I've been thinking of some way of proceeding. I would say if we see things from our personal vantage point, then of course things do look disappointing. I think we have to be very clear in our thinking. That is, to what extent we are really dependent upon those things that we for granted and whether we would be able to continue to subsist without this support. That will give us a sense of independence. Actually we suffer in our self-esteem from our dependence. At least it can afford a protection when we are abandoned and can't transfer dependence upon someone else. That is where the way of the ascetics, the need for freedom, is written in us. We do have a need for freedom. We have a need for involvement and we have a need for freedom. Our need for freedom will come to our rescue to help us to face difficult hurdles.

 Funneling the Cosmic Consciousness 

We are not always aware of our body feelings and how we feel emotionally. There is no doubt that the body being skin bound (at least what we think of as the body) has an effect upon the way consciousness of the cosmos is funneled down and focalized in what we call our consciousness. The consequence is we assess our problems from that vantage point. As I often say, if we see Notre Dame from only one vantage point, we haven't seen Notre Dame. 

There is a bias in our assessment of our problems and there is a bias in our assessment of our selves, of our self-image, and of our emotions. The bias is at all levels because consciousness is being followed down. The only remedy for that is to expand consciousness. It's very difficult if we think that we are our body because our body ends at our skin. Our consciousness is limited by that. 

This is the reason for the method that I have been using in trying to become aware of our magnetic field, and trying to become aware of our aura, our awareness extends beyond the profile of our body. That has enormous consequences in terms of our assessment of our problems. We learn to look at our problem from the point of view of other people, of the persons who are involved in that problem. When we see the problem from two vantage points instead of one, it's better than one. It doesn't mean it's perfect, but it's better. If we increase the vantage points, even then it is not sufficient, but it's still ahead of the usual vantage point. 
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We have ya Mu'id and ya Muhyi. Mu'id is restoring, that's therapy. Muhyi is regenerating, so it is fostering, galvanizing the energy written right into nature, self-organizing itself. Muhyi is not just to recover but to invite a new dispensation of energy. Ya Mu'id is like when order has been disturbed, there is a force in nature that restores it (up to a point). For example, if we displaced a branch of a tree when walking through a forest, it will get back to where it was; it has a kind of elasticity. Of course, if the damage is too great, then it's much more difficult to restore the status quo. The rain forest will grow and the asphalt roads will be pushed out by vegetation in the end. They will have to keep repairing the roads, but they won't be quite the same as they were before. It is good that we don't return to where we were, but we go forward.

Muhyi is a kind of consciousness we have. It's reinforcing meditation. It's knowing we can really rely upon the ability of nature to self-organize itself if we do not intervene. If we intervene, it's like medicine. For example, take a medicine. The body says, "OK, I think the medicine can do it. We don't have to count upon our immune system because the medicine is going to do it. Its the same way here. If we intervene we might blow the whole trip. Just at first feel the tremendous energy that emerges if we don't turn it away. It is true that this energy needs to be customized. We are customizing something, a power that has emerged, a kind of cosmic power. In fact the whole of life is exactly that. Its the way the universe is customizing each of us in a unique way, so it's not a matter of trying to toe the line, but really bringing our personal will or incentive into operation. 

The Tibetans talk about the gross body. The say, "The mind rides the wind." We have different bodies; bodies are forms of energy. The gross body is what we think is our physical body. The mode of thinking when we are identified with the physical body is gross thinking, and interpreting situations as we do. Then the Tibetans talk about the subtle wind. What they are saying is the subtle mind rides the subtle wind. If we identify with the subtle body, then our mind thinks differently; that is the subtle mind instead of the gross mind. The subtle mind is the creative mind.

If we want to progress at all in meditation, instead of going into those very high celestial spheres, we need to do some mopping up or sweeping inside ourselves and some cleansing of our emotions. I think the clue is selfishness. I think that is the opposite of what we mean by saintliness. Therefore any notion of God can't be intellectual. It's not just the concept of the ego, it's more like the selfishness of our ego, which is alien to the notion of the Divinity of our being. 

This is the kind of thing I do in a retreat. I try to cleanse my inner motivations with the light of truth. The truth is like a light. That which is dishonest will always try to escape in the dark. I get up at nighttime. I hear a noise in my room. I think it's a mouse. I know it's a mouse or I assume it's a mouse. Sure enough, it is a mouse. If I put the light of truth onto that mouse, it will leap into the darkness. That's what happens to us when we try to corner our intention. We try to escape in the dark. The only power that will cleanse the inside is absolute authenticity. That's the value of Haqq, truth. That is the word of the dervish. 

The dervish says, "Don't you come near me because you're lying. I will burn you." Hazarat Bibijan was a woman dervish who lived in India in a little hut. She said, (Page 19) "You can't reach your destination without looking into my eyes. You can't look into my eyes if you are lying." We have to decide what we want to do. Some people make a detour. That's what we do when we don't want to face truth. The dervish Dhikr is the most powerful of all practices, that is: Haqq la illaha illa 'lla hu, Haqq la illaha illa 'lla hu. It starts with truth. al Hallaj was crucified because he said. "Anal Haqq -- I am the truth."

We can't have a better vacuum cleaner than Haqq. There is no ambiguity. That's Haqq. This kind of cleansing is therapy. There has been damage to the ambiguity in our thinking, a kind of dishonesty. We accuse other people of having abused us, but there is also something in us that has caused damage in our psyche. We want to cure it, that means to dissolve it, like a canker can be dissolved. In some cases even a cancerous growth can be dissolved. 

When we have psychological pain, it tells us we have to do something to deal with it. When the abuse is in our self-esteem, that's where the pain is. It's in our loss of, damage to our self-esteem. Self-esteem is vulnerable as it is, and now it's being humiliated; it gets really very bad. Since our whole behavior in life depends so much on our self-esteem, it's a very tragic situation. In that case our dependence on people becomes much more important than ever before because having lost our self-esteem, we need help. That's why we go to a psychotherapist to have some support. It's not just that the psychotherapist mirrors thoughts. Behind it all there is a sense of containment, of being with somebody who is supportive and is not judgmental. Therapy is one step. I think it could be considered as trying to recover the situation as it was prior to being humiliated, reinstating the integrity of our being that we are doubting. 

Here I refer to the Dhikr because the Dhikr is a very important thing. When we say, "La," (expansion), instead of just thinking our consciousness is expanding, we think we are dissolving things in ourselves that are standing in the way. We are removing them, Ghani, we are removing them. Even as the physical world is very kind in taking our pollution up to a point, it may be also that at the psychological level God is kind enough to take our mucky psychological stuff. We've got to put it somewhere. Think of fana, a word used by the Sufis, the extinction and then the rebirthing. As Ibn' Arabi says, fana is the extinction of our notion of ourselves. It's not ourselves that gets extinguished, it's the false notion of ourselves.

Two wazaif, ya Hasib and ya Muhsi, draw our attention to our sense of responsibility, our sense of accountability, which will have enormous consequences in terms of our behavior because they will unleash potentialities that will remain latent if we continue to act in a way that is damaging to other people. 

The best form of this sense of propriety is to be found in the word Adl--the just. We pass judgment sometimes without weighing situations carefully enough, and as a consequence, we damage people. We can impair a situation by our faulty judgment. At this level our judgment is based upon an innate sense we have of fairness, of being just in our dealings with people. If we feel our verdict in a situation was not well thought out, and we have other thoughts about it, misgivings about our judgment, then we can redress it. Call that person and say, "Look, I must say, I'd like to (Page 20) reconsider what I said because in my conscience I'm not quite happy with the conclusions I arrived at." That's Adl. Were shifting gears and we are able to look at the situation without the personal bias. The cycle is that we carry our faulty impressions of situations in our psyche throughout our lives. We need to clear our psyche of our false interpretations so it's free from that which is standing in the way of the unfurling of our potentials.

 The Survey 

In the perspective of Khayal, we consider our relationship with people, our dependence upon the comforts and facilities afforded by our civilizations. We have responded to the lure of the people we loved, the people we still love. There is an unsettling feeling about those with whom we no longer feel in sync. We have tried to deal dispassionately, fairly with our opponents. We have tried to love those who make themselves difficult to love, who in fact exhibit the qualities we dislike: selfishness, heartlessness, disagreeableness, dishonesty, insincerity, arrogance, impertinence, acting in a manipulative, aggressive, domineering way. There are those who have let us down, those who repress us, those who humiliate us for their own aggrandizement, those who mock us or shun us or despise us. Mercifully, some people have proven to be our friends, standing by us in loyalty, in joy, and in duress. Some people inspire us, give us confidence in ourselves, or are of friendly counsel. Some hold us in esteem, sharing our tribulations and appreciating the values we pursue in staunchness of heart.

Gauge the degree to which people are conditioned. We rub shoulders with the beautiful, sometimes the attractive who have questionable intent, sometimes the ugly with beautiful souls, the grossness, the nobility. Muse upon the feelings or reactions in ourselves which we do not like, or are ashamed of, that the people with whom we are interfacing arouse in us. Now we look at our life, not just in retrospect, but in an embracing compass. See how every situation is intermingled with every other, sometimes in a meaningful way, sometimes incongruously. Try to toggle between our ideal and our handling of situations; are they reconcilable at all? How involved are we with it all? Does our longing for peace and for the sublime exercise such an intense pull upon our soul that we venture to seek yonder? A passion for the sublime, the celestial, for nobility, the majestic, will pummel the soul. Yet, we must beware of the temptation of wishing to possess it. It would prove to be one more symptom of that covetousness we are jettisoning on our flight; therefore Pir-o-Murshid called it a passion for the unattainable.

Take to the road leading nowhere but away--the pilgrimage, the freedom, the peacenot away from our circumstances (except for a short respite), but from our own limitation. The very power of our high quest will pull us out of our rut, our prison, which we know is not just our circumstances, but ourselves. In fact, it is indifference and independence that is our saving, which will loosen our ties with the world. 

Mark this, it is not the coldness of 'splendid isolation,' because the intensity of the emotion of ecstasy prevails over our pain and dismay, warms our heart, and sparks our spirit with delight. As we step into freedom, tuck away those we cherish in our heart; carry them with us in our high venture. We may help them, free them too. (Page 21) Remember our objective: being in the world but not of the world; rather than seeking other worldliness, infusing the way of the world with the spiritual dimension. 
If he only knew and witnessed the fact that the whole cosmos speaks by glorifying and lauding its Creator, and that it witnesses Him, how could he renounce it as long as it has this attribute? God has let him witness and shown him His signs upon the horizon, everything outside and in himself. The messenger of God used to go alone to the cave of Hira to devote himself to God and flee from seeing people, since he used to find in himself straightness and constriction in seeing them. Had he gazed upon the face of God within them, he would not have fled from them, nor would he have sought to be alone with himself. He remained like this until God revealed Himself to him suddenly. Then he returned to the creatures and stayed with them. Every seeker of his Lord must be alone with himself with his Lord in his inmost consciousness, since God gave man an outward and an inward dimension only so that he might be alone with God in his inner dimension, and witness Him in his outward dimension after having gazed upon Him in his inward dimension. Otherwise he will never recognize Him. Man's inner dimension is the cell of his retreat. 
Ibn Arabi
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Arwah

If we keep identifying with our personal consciousness as the spectator, our insight is limited; therefore our first step consists in expanding the sense of 'me.' We now find that by extending our identity from our skin-bound notion of our body to our magnetic field, or etheric body, then our aura, right into the stars, will prove helpful at the start.

Now we extend the compass of our conscious outreach. Having achieved this, we remember how things looked from our personal perspective. If we do so, we see it is as though we had flown in an airplane at 5000 feet, overlooking a vast panorama, and have now descended to land, and our horizon has shrunk to 50 feet. Now flying high again, we remember how things looked in that restricted perspective, but instead of dismissing that perspective as maya, illusory, we can see it in the context of the larger panorama. Of course this takes care only of one dimension, the cosmic; the transcendent is still to come.

In this perspective, we grasp the manner in which our problems are inextricably interconnected with those of others, in fact with those of the world at large, and furthermore, in what way our problems are intermeshed with our being and our condition.
For the mystic everything is connected; there is no condition that is detached from another condition. A mechanism is always running in relation to another mechanism, however different and disconnected they may seem, To gain insight, the mystic enters into the depth of the whole mechanism of the universe.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The thought 'me' can only have any meaningfulness as a ripple within that greater myself (the cosmos experienced as the environment). It consternates my mind, because I can only declare that the cosmos is not other than me--or the cosmos is me--if the concept myself has lost its meaning. This is disconcerting for my common sense view, because, voided of a boundary, I have no alternative than to accept that I am what I thought was 'other,' the environment. However, as I exhale, my instinct for self-preservation resists losing my sense of identity as being a 'discrete entity.' I realize that all I lose is my self-image, which is inadequate to say the least-and that only for a brief instant-is not my self. While inhaling, I find myself again. That reassures me.
It takes a new way of thinking to see that we are a relatively stable, independent, and autonomous feature of a holistic totality. 
Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, 1977, p. 12. (Page 23) 
A key to letting go of our personal identity is to envision ourselves as 'a condition of the universe.' We are not God, but a condition of God, like a wave is a condition of the whole ocean (not just a fraction).
The soul may be considered to be a condition of God, a condition which makes the Being limited for a time. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Soul Whence and Whither, 'Manifestation'
Now as I think I am inhaling and exhaling, I realize that it is the cosmos is inhaling and exhaling.

 Turning Within: Identifying with the Subtle Body 

To arouse and awaken our psychological potentials, we need to capture them from within, hence our need to learn how to turn within. To grasp how things look when turning within, we need to first shift our body identity. There is a way of blurring body consciousness by realizing that our sense of 'substantiality' is just the way matter looks from the commonplace point of view. What we perceive out there is the same as--isomorphic with--brain processes. Our very act of objectifying, as in an electron microscope, alters what we hope to see.
If we did not have that lens (which is the mathematics performed by your brain) maybe we would know a world organized in the frequency domain, no space, no time. Mystical states may allow us occasional direct access to that domain. 
Karl Pribham, Cf. Revision, Vol. I, No. 3/4, 1978, p. 11.
If we knew what physicists have discovered about the electrons and protons of what we identify with as our body, we would see what we think is our bodyness is not our bodyness at all. It is the outer manifestation of a template, a life-field, a program powered by energy. I try to 'feel' an area surrounding my body like the field of a magnet. If I identify with this field, I feel unstable, volatile, like a force field instead of a substantial body. This subtle level of reality is called in Yoga tanmatra. I begin to feel it vibrating. The more I feel this vibration, the more intensely I find myself being immersed in a subliminal reality subjacent to the world I am used to. This field could be the life-field (of which the electromagnetic field is only an item). Consider it as the template in which our body is being configured; therefore a deeper reality than the body we generally identify with. I find as long as I can maintain identifying myself with this field, my boundary with the environment evaporates. I merge in the totality, both at the end of my exhaling (in the infinite vastness of space), and inhaling (in the void within).
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, by dissolving into it, and by being conscious of that one Spirit being the existence, the only existence. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Message (Page 24) 
Bereft of a boundary, what seemed like an osmosis with the environment (an input of energy from the environment and a diffusion of my energy in the environment) now can only be described as an ebb and flow within the same liquid, as in a whirlpool, where the totality of the water of the lake organizes itself in a specific way, while the vortex extends through the entire lake. Identifying with, for example, the field of a magnet that has no boundary, or a wave intermeshed in a wave-interference pattern, helps me to see how my identity, though not based upon my location in space, still has its specific uniqueness. It takes a lot of concentration to avoid slipping back into the usual perspective.

Even though I realize I do not have a boundary, when identifying with the etheric stuff with which I find myself intermeshed, I find myself trying to reconcile representing myself as the totality of that force field of the entire cosmos (the template of the physical cosmos where I lose myself) with the evanescent flow surfacing within this totality which (though it converges the totality) gets gelled into some kind of particular feature of itself, which I identify as me. 

Another illustration helps me: I am like a wave in the sea, since the whole ocean arises as each wave, I am that ocean, yet I am also that wave and each wave has different features. What remains of me? This is the baffling paradox, because, while there is no boundary between the wave and the ocean, the whole ocean emerges in a different configuration as each wave. This has drastic consequences in terms of my self-image. For one thing I see now more clearly than ever that it is not a discrete entity, encapsulated within a boundary, and further, because it is surfacing, emerging, and reemerging, it is transforming itself continually. Thus, this dynamic representation of myself, instead of my sclerosed self-image, opens the door to change, to growth, to evolution, to revolution.

Were caught in a perspective, so how do we get out of that perspective? How do we proceed? If we remember, we turn within in order to capture the creative thoughts that have not been conditioned by the environment. It's not reactive; we downplay the impressions from the environment. The Hindu method consists of dismissing them altogether, the radical method. The Sufi method is a little more sophisticated. Take the model of the human body. Our psyche, rather like the human body, needs to enrich itself by the interface with the environment--the physical and psychological environment, the emotional environment, all levels of the environment. 

We find the key to cause the shifting of our identity from body consciousness to what I call the template of the body, which is the etheric body. It could be called life, it is a part of all things and is not encapsulated within a barrier, in respect to our time, but it is intermeshing with all things from within--reaching out from inside. Then we begin to see the expression of what I call the countenance behind the face. To be more concrete, it is the expression that is coming through that face. Now that expression is telling us a lot of things. It is the ability to see the form of the etheric body or the aura, our inner form is coming through our countenance. There is a clue. We've got something really concrete here instead of something abstract. 

Here is a key practice to do in our own meditations. We identify with the two beams of the light of our eyes. Think of our eyes. We identify with our glance, and it's a (Page 25) reality that the eyes do emit light, or rather light in the brain is created through the optic nerves and breaks through the retina and breaks through the cornea and reaches out into our space. Normally that light is so weak compared with the light that accrues to us from outside, that we don't realize it. If we close our eyes, we can concentrate on those two beams, and we become very aware of them. Now when we open our eyes we know the light from the environment is going to prevail upon the light in our eyes, and therefore we won't be able to keep our concentration unless we exercise a very strong intent of our will. 

What we do is train ourselves to open our eyes just at the moment we start exhaling, but try to keep our concentration on those two beams. Then we can't see people. It's a blur, but if we keep on doing that we become used to it. Now we start practicing with a flower. We have a flower in front of us and we do this, then we open our eyes and our glance is directed towards a flower, looking at a flower. Looking at one petal, then the other, and some extrapolating between those two. There is a Zen practice which consists in looking at the flower--without moving our glance--from one petal to the other, and to the exclusion of anything around the flower. Then after twenty minutes, we look around the flower. The flower seems to be floating in the air. It's an unusual way of looking, and so we realize we can allay the usual way of looking. 

Having done this practice, we are able to look at a person and now we see something about that person we cannot see if we are judging either by what the person says or by the appearance of that person. It's much more real. That in us which is mirroring that person is not our ordinary personality. It's a level of our personality whereby we see our personality as the way that beacon of God comes through in its individual aspect and its individual presentation. We are still conscious of our individuality, but our individuality is somehow seen in the context of the whole. We discover the wider outreach of our being.

It s like when we ingest food, the food needs to be digested, and in fact even at the stage of ingesting we reject things that are totally indigestible. There needs to be some power that rejects that which is unwanted in our thinking. This is the only faculty in us that gives us the ability to reject an impression because it is not in sync with our true being. 

Now consider that our face is a mask and our real face is the countenance behind that mask. That's why the mirror is one of the most misleading and cheapest feedback systems in the world. It's misleading if we go by what we see. Although we're not aware of it, the mirror has played a very important part in the whole evolution of the thoughts of humanity. As in the Greek plays, we have a mask, and at some point we take off the mask. It's quite a radical thing to do when we are meditating, to take away our mask.

Now we are taking away our role-playing. Pir-o-Murshid says, "The king thinks he is a king because people call him Your Majesty," or the guru thinks he/she is a guru because of the devotion of his/her pupils, or the servant thinks he/she is a servant, or a young man thinks he is poor because he does not know that his father has left a fortune in the bank for him, or the business person thinks he/she is a business person, or the old person thinks he/she is old. (Page 26) 
This is the game of role-playing, which is an illusory veneer masking what we truly are. It is the situation in which we are that makes us believe that we are this or that. When man lives in this limitation, he does not know that another part of himself exists which is much higher, more wonderful, more living and more exalted.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As long as we identify with our role we will never know who we are. The other thing is, in the rhythm of our thinking we translate what we imply by what we explain. It's language that makes that transit and therefore limits what we imply. The trouble is we forget what we imply and believe in what we explain. We've lost touch with what we imply, and that's what we call our intuition. To turn within we have to give up being precise and thinking in terms of words because it's our language that limits what we imply. More deeply, as we turn within, if we can unmask the hoax of the thoughts that accrue from outside and ask ourselves, "What is it that I really value in life?" We'll really get in touch not just with our heart but with our soul. That's going to stir us in the depths of our being so a lot of qualities that are longing to manifest will come through. 

Now when I dive still deeper within, I encounter a ghostly level subliminal to the electromagnetic phenomena, or my etheric body, or aura of light that physicists call the 'scalar field,' discovered in the Bohm-Akharanov experiment. The template behind form is the 'phase relationship' of the electron waves to each other. It is not an energy field but a configuring energy template. The energy here is virtual; it could be illustrated by that which is present in a rope when both teams in a tug-of-war balance each other to a standstill. It is what the Sufis call kemal, and that is what I grasp as I meditate. It is baffling, because it represents our virtuality, maybe the impending energy that triggers off life as a catalyst. It reminds me of the view of physicists about gravitation as ripples in space-time. Buddha came upon it under the tree. He devised a method to shift consciousness from the sensory level. Imagine space without matter.

If we shift haltingly to a deeper level, we envision space as the canvas, or rather the code, behind the architectony of that beautiful work of art, the cosmos. We are touching upon a state subliminal to gravitation, because space is landscaped, warped by matter. Voided of matter we can touch upon space in its inexhaustible, endless and meaningful fluctuations that pummel our consciousness out of its purview into infinite vastness beyond the "I." But, perplexity! It avers itself not to be three-dimensional. I have to overcome any representation of form, since these are features of our three-dimensional cross-section of the multi-dimensional cosmos.
It is in our mentality, in our perceiving apparatus that we must find the conditions of the world's three-dimensionality. It is also there that we must discover the conditions of the possibility of a higher-dimensional world. 
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, Vintage 1982, p. 61. (Page 27) 
One finds a peculiar new property, which I call non-locality of connection. This violates the classical requirements of locality--that only things very close to each can influence each other.
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 7.
I have lost my sense of location in space. Indeed, space plays no part in our identification with the idiosyncrasies of our personality, only identification with our body. Hence downplaying our sense of being located in space will help in shifting our consciousness from our bodyness to our psyche. Since my sense of localization in space is totally upset, I have to give up the thought of sitting in (wherever it is) on retreat. I have to accept that while in the 'transfigured state,' since my identity extends beyond my skin, 'where I am' has lost its meaning, including the profile of my body that now appears as a shroud. I can see if I tried to remember where I am located on the planet, it would pull me back into identifying with my bodyness. In these conditions, it is a tour de force to keep turning within without blanking out; so I thought of a subterfuge. I imagined waves of energy intertwining in a wave-interference pattern, bearing in mind that these 'discrete' eddies are not lost, I have only lost sight of them; in fact it is ultimately what the mind untrained in physics has difficulty in grasping, namely a web of phase-relationships.
Our Mode of Thinking when Turning Within

In our usual way of life, thoughts are continually surfacing, sometimes meaningfully, sometimes randomly. Even if there is nobody to talk to, as under a vow of silence in a retreat, we are so used to articulating our thoughts in idiomatic modes of expression that we unconsciously translate our thoughts into words in our minds. In this mode, our thinking is fragmented into thoughts. 

I need to shift my mode of thinking into grasping what I imply behind what I explain (to others and to myself). Do I realize to what extent I think in the words I have been brought up to stand for conventional concepts? My thinking is conditioned by the usual, commonplace, middle-range thinking of society. If I wish to understand further, I need to adopt a different manner of thinking that is not limited by 'the categories of reason' (of Emmanuel Kant).

We cannot envision anymore the world as divisible in fragments. Fragmentation is therefore an attitude of mind which disposes the mind to regard divisions between things as absolute and final, rather than as ways that have only a relative and limited range of usefulness and validity.
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 24.
Those to whom unity is revealed see the absolute whole in the parts (7 & 8). Yet each is in despair at its particularization from the whole (17). Behold the world entirely comprised in yourself. The world is a man and man is a world (15). 
Shabistari, E.H.Whinfield, Mahmood Shabistari's Gulshan iRaz (1880). (Page 28) 
The alternative is thinking that the cosmos is looking at me; seeing ourselves as seen by the cosmos, like Saint Francis of Assisi, definitely breaks our ordinary mode of thinking. It shakes the very foundations of all our ordinary thinking, daringly. On retreat, however, there is no need to express our thoughts, consequently we think in context, extrapolating between infinite ranges of realization. We now grasp what we imply behind what we explain (express explicitly).
The one who tunes himself not only to the external, but to the inner being and to the essence of all things, gets an insight into the essence of the whole being. Therefore he can, to the same extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty of the flower. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order. 
David Bohm 
Turning within, we now grasp what is enacted behind the apparent scenario, our human problems. We reconnoiter the springheads triggering the situation; we also clinch a completely different image of ourselves, the resourcefulness subliminal to our personality, out of which personality unfurls as a flower out of the seed of the plant. 

Only if my emotions are intent on 'another kingdom' can I emancipate myself from the impact of the usual perspective on the alternate perspective which I am trying to maintain, namely to focus on that which transpired from behind what appeared. It is by consciously, willfully considering the commonplace perspective as relative rather than absolute, freeing myself from the backlash of the appearance of things, that I can grasp the deeper issues. Yet I cannot grasp these simply by downplaying the appearance (this remains a negative attitude), but only while giving vent to my bewondering at espying an--albeit intangible--glimpse of the splendor that my intuition cleaves to precariously. Its evidence helps me to overcome the doubt of the commonplace mind, whose hoax I have been able to unmask, as to these paramount values. Consequently, I do not simply 'react' any more to the way the situation appears to my psyche, enlisting the usual reactive behavior.

Now consider a problem with a person. At first sight, inevitably, instinctively, we pass judgment on the characters of the people involved with us in that situation. Moreover, if we entertain an inquisitive mind, we infer from the situation what could have been the cause, or even caution with foreboding against the damaging effects it harbors for the future. If we have gained a modicum of wisdom as we mature, and found freedom in ourselves from our self-image by practicing indifference, we will eschew simply reacting emotionally. If we are familiar with some of the archetypal attributes that we have learned in Sufism (the Names of God), we would be intrigued to grasp what those qualities are which have incurred limitation in both that person and in ourselves by our ignorance of whom we are ourselves, and who the other person is, and to see what is being enacted in that little personal drama between that person and ourselves. Mark, we have touched here upon the (Page 29) critical issue, our reactive strategies are determined by whom we think we are, which is our self-image, and conversely our self-image is a projection arising out of the perspective in which we see ourselves in the situation.


The secret of weaning ourselves from our reliance upon our ego strategy consists in discovering who we really are.

 The Obstacles 

A prior caution: Our defects are the shadows of our qualities. Unless reconnoitered, and dealt with, they will obstruct the emergence of latent potentials. Since they are shadows, it is better to sublimate them so they get appropriated into the quality of which they are the shadow, thereby absorbing the shadow, rather than pruning them; because, as long as we call upon them to deal in our defensive strategy, we rely upon them until we discover the quality in us of which they are the shadow. For example indolence can be converted into patience, and impatience into a painstaking disposition, arrogance into mastery, leniency into compassion, facetiousness into joy. That then is what we need to work with. It takes just that flash of realization.

As we turn within, certain qualities seem to be trying to emerge at this stage in our life, or to borrow a metaphor, chipping at the egg to emerge, as does the chick. What has been holding them back so far? We were locked in our personal self-image (the shell) with which we identified ourselves. Particularly our self-denigration is our greatest handicap. Here again, we are faced with paradoxical logic: the features of our higher self are still there, intermeshed with the features of our reactive and acquisitive ego.

The practice I recommend consists in observing, then earmarking, then highlighting the features of our etheric body, or sense any emotional attunement or any trait in our demeanor with which we do not feel comfortable. As soon as it is reconnoitered, work with it, even as a musician would stop playing a piece to correct it and start again. Bad habits slip into our personality through dissatisfaction, impatience, intolerance, slovenliness, disappointment, bearing grudges, selfishness, or a lack of charity. The characteristics of people tend to spill over surreptitiously, contagiously, because we have all these propensities in us, but with perspicacity we may arouse or downplay them. Moreover, in a retreat situation, where we are more sensitive to emotional attunements--atmospheres--than usual, we can work with transmuting them. It is the pledge to 'do this,' or 'not to do this,' that will catalyze the outburst of the quality that had been withheld.

I suddenly find myself in a new phase (maqam) in my life. I must promise to remind myself of this as I find myself back in the nitty-gritty of worldly circumstances. How would I like to be? It is there as an idyllic attractor, bestowing hope upon me by luring me forward. Instead of thinking the future is unknown, I think it is myself who builds it. What is standing in the way? The paradox is that unless we know how to transfer our reliance upon our defenses from our primitive defense system, the very features of that strategy stand in the way of the qualities that we need to awaken. What are these perfunctory strategies and what would be the more effective substitutes? This is precisely what we are aiming at in the progressive meditative practices we are undertaking. Transmute rage into outrage; self-pity into courage; (Page 30) criticism into appreciation; dominance into respect; emulation by covetousness into independence upon possession, rank, or position into honorability; leniency or being too accommodating into compassion. The shadow of our qualities highlights the qualities.

It is when we have been humiliated that we realize the boon of being honored. Hence the Wazaif: ya Khafid, (the abaser), ya Rafi (the exalter), ya Mudhill (the humiliator), ya Muizz (the honorer). There is no way of arousing dormant potentials unless we first unhoax our justifications when cross-examining our motivations. Here lies the obstacle that we can negotiate as a hurdle. Furthermore, we cannot access the emergence of this rebirthing if we are perturbed by the prevailing circumstances. One perspective masks the other. We cannot see the stars if the sun is in the sky. Therefore we need to place a buffer between the challenge of the world and ourselves. Reacting would be short-circuiting, and hence not availing ourselves of the bountiful pool of resourcefulness in the seedbed of our personality. Yogis place their fingers on their senses; Buddha suggests rather "placing a sentinel at the doors of perception;" the Sufi dervishes advocate downplaying the input from outside to highlight the emergence of 'possible things' (imkan) from inside.
How is higher consciousness attained? By closing our eyes to our limited self and opening one's heart to the God who is all perfection. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
  (Page 31) 
Mithal 

By learning to turn within in meditation, we are able to operate the critical transit from our commonplace perspective and its matching mode of action--reacting to the challenge by the strategy of the ego--to arousing dormant potentials lying in wait in the seedbed of our personality, thus unfurling them. If we have been able to shift our body identity, to identifying with our subtle body, our way of thinking will have shifted to the turning within mode. Now as we meditate, instead of spending time regurgitating past events or trying to sort out present situations, we first zoom in on the defects which we had been calling upon to help us in our battle with circumstances as we estimated them--precisely those which obstruct the qualities that are trying to emerge. We are able to ascertain that they are like the deterioration of a fruit, which must fall apart so the seed may emerge. In fact, when the fruit has completed its task, it is discharged by the seed, which looks for its nutrient in the wider soil. 

Concentrate on the new; let the old fade away. Here meditation avers itself to be transforming. To arouse our dormant potentialities, we need to capture what is being revealed to us of ourselves, instead of what we think we are. 

Imagine we thought we were that part of a plant above the surface of the earth; now discover that we are more truly the seed or bulb, buried under the earth, that includes, in addition to those potentialities that have already unfurled as the stem and flowers, infinite potentialities that are lying in wait for us to arouse. 
He can find and enjoy in the seed the fragrance and beauty of the flower.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now think that we are the universe emerging while converged in us, and therefore the universe is revealing its meaning to us within the limits of our capacity to decipher its multi-dimensional meaningfulness. 

All that we know of the universe are simply clues to the reality of which the cosmos is the manifestation, not only in the physical and psychological environment, but also in our very personality. According to the Sufis these clues are the devices whereby God reveals His/Her reality experientially, if we follow these spoors to discover what is trying to transpire through that which appears. 
We shall show them our signs at the horizons and in themselves.
Qur'an, XLI 53. 

The Sufi masters point out that, for example, our insight into why we are offended by another person is a model that can be acquired, whereas we cannot acquire cognizance of the latent qualities in the seedbed of our personality even though they are known to us unconsciously. They can only be disclosed to us according to the place we have reached in our developmental stages.  (Page 32) 
No one knows what is within himself until it is unveiled to him instant by instant.
Ibn' Arabi 
The key to personal creativity is, rather than looking for God 'up there,' to discover Him emerging from within oneself. 
The Creator is hidden in His creation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

 Unfurling Potentialities through Accomplishment 

The values here are not the same as at the first level. At the first level we valued very practical needs, comfort and so forth. Now we value sthetic values and we feel the need to accomplish and achieve. Pir-o-Murshid attached much importance to what is gained by accomplishment (which is quite the opposite of what we find in the tradition of the ascetics) because in Sufism we validate what is gained by life instead of retiring from life; our accomplishment is very important. 

Pir-o-Murshid sees a relationship between our accomplishment and the unfurling of our potentialities. For example, by facing a challenge we develop power. Then with that power we can accomplish something more challenging. That's a quality, but there are other qualities that will be enhanced by the action. In fact, the Sufis make a distinction between a knowledge that precedes action and a knowledge that is gained by action. Like a sculptor discovers his/her statue by making it, so we discover ourselves by our activities out there; otherwise our potentialities remain latent. That is one of the ways of calling forth our latent potentials, even though its well nigh impossible to know what our latent qualities are. They are lying in wait. We need to call them forth, but we cannot know them unless we create situations in which they emerge. I remember reading an article which said electrons exist only if we create circumstances favorable to their actuating themselves in existence. That's a very revolutionary view of things: God only exists if we find God.

An important wazifa for this is ya Wajid which means to find. I remember when I was in the Navy during the war. I was an officer in the British Navy watching German submarines on the horizon at night. If we scanned the horizon with our glance, we wouldn't be able to pick up the impression. It was a very nebulous impression, so we had to be really sort of withdrawn and watchful. An impression will force our attention towards it instead of us turning our attention towards it, so Wajid is linked in my mind with ya Raqib which means to be watchful. It's good to keep on the alert and watch for what's coming through us, otherwise we won't find it.

Batin, if we read the translation, means the hidden, the veiled one, like the mother of the world is described as being veiled. There's a very vulnerable, deep core of our being that we are wary of exposing to the derision, or the lack of holiness, the sacrilege of people, so we are to a certain extent enshrouded by a veil. If we are on retreat and are observing silence, then we get in touch with the deep soul searchings of the depths of our mind, which we try to articulate sometimes in our words, and (Page 33) we feel an inadequacy of being able to express in words. Even if we are silent for a short time, we are still thinking in terms of words. If we have been observing silence for a long time, then we lose that tendency to interpret our implicit thoughts in words, and at that time we are much more aware of our deep thoughts.

That means we have a veil; we are carrying a veil. That is not only true with regard to thoughts, but also with regard to the form of our subtle body, as compared with the form of our face for example, or our physical body. It's the template, it's the secondary effect of the template, it's a mold, it's actuation.

We are looking at a person and if we are able to look in depth, we can see the expression is coming through the face. The Sufis express this by saying the veil reveals and conceals at the same time. The veil is concealing our real being and, on the other hand, it is exposing the form of that being. Just like the veil of a lady exposes the form of her face. That's why Fariduddin Attar says, "Glory to the one who conceals Himself by the same veil that reveals Him, and reveals Himself by the same veil that conceals Him." That means we are called upon to express the inexpressible. It can be at the cost of our life, like al Hallaj. The unveiling of that which is hidden is a great risk, yet it is answering a call.

We are sometimes called upon to try to express the very depths of our being. Consequently, we feel extremely vulnerable, and yet we have the courage to do it. This is what we are trying to do, to learn to have the courage to do this, because we are part of what is happening at the cosmic scale, and that is the whole of the physical world is the manifestation, tajaliat, the manifestation of the non-manifest. We have that in us, the non-manifest, which calls upon itself to reveal itself, and so remove the veil. That is the eternal feminine removing the veil, and this is felt very strongly in our time. 

It's in the nature of life that it should be known. It is the hidden treasure of Islam that desired to be known. That word is Zahir. Zahir is the lifting, or removal of the veil. It is the absolute equivalent of that word, 'Epiphany.' It is the outburst of light, the Epiphanos.

As we inhale, think of the word Batin, which means turning within, the seedbed of our personality, the seedbed of the whole of the existential state. Like the networks of roots that are submerged behind the water lilies at the surface. We become very sensitive and of course, we are aware of our fragility. That's where we find our soul searchings, the Divine nostalgia welling up from the depth of our being. The gift of creativity has the effect that we want to express it, but are afraid that we will betray the sacredness of it, and also that we will express it inadequately. There is a blockage there somewhere: that's the veil.

On one hand, we are veiled. That is, we know the veil has some transparency so it's not a complete barrier. We are veiled from outside, but from inside we are absolutely open, the whole of the universe is welling up in us, like the ocean is welling up in a wave. It is a very deep emotion. It's nostalgia. That is what is meant by Ishq Allah, deep nostalgia. We dont know how to interpret it in words. It's impersonal, it's personal, there is no way, but it's very impelling.
 (Page 34) 
Because there is some containment by the veil, we can turn away from the veil in the opposite direction, and reach within. We can think of our personality as the trunk of a tree with all the branches and leaves and fruit. Now, we are getting right down into the roots. As Pir-o-Murshid says, "One comes to the state in which one can see in the roots." We can aspire in the roots. The trunk and the branches and the leaves and the flowers and the fruit are all impending within the roots. The seed now perhaps will dispense a kind of power because we know the seed begins to open up, unfurl, and become a plant. It's a kind of force within the root--like the bulb of a tulip--to manifest. 

We alternate between inhaling and exhaling, and as we exhale, we think of the word Zahir, the outburst of light. Of course, it's all really outbursts of reality manifesting in a tangible way. It's a kind of release of that impending energy. As the Sufis say, "Release from the solitude of unknowing, the hidden treasure that desired to be known."

Now we have ya Mubdi and ya Muqaddem. Ya Mubdi is the origination of the causal chain, determinism. Everything was programmed, although according to the Sufis--the more advanced Sufis of course--the Divine programming is dynamic instead of static and therefore there is feedback from the hardware and the software. There are some words of Jelaluddin Rumi which are really shattering. He says, "Tonight, the umpteen stars give birth to the life eternal." Fariduddin Attar says, "That which was limited by ephemera will be eternalized." That is the feedback from the existential to the programming. Mubdi is really talking about the way the programming has progressed, but it mutated. 

Muqaddem is talking about what in Christianity is called creatio ex nihilo, creation out of nothing; it interrupts the flow of the causal chain, the evolutionary flow. It's a new element that comes in. That's creativity, or maybe creativity requires a combination of those two: what is determined and what is new. It could be illustrated for example by a wave in the sea. In one sense the wave has been causated by the previous wave, but on the other hand the whole sea emerges anew as each wave. 

It starts with creativity. That's the first way we are able to express our freedom. A Sufi Pir-o-Murshid says, "Oh man, if only you knew that you are free. It is your ignorance of your freedom that is your captivity."

 Enlisting the Creative Power of Our Imagination 

Since consciousness is used to resting upon perception, we need to downplay the perceptive function of consciousness in order to highlight its imaginal faculty. Here it becomes obvious we are introducing factors into our personality that upgrade our effectiveness against abuse and mishandling, without our becoming aggressive, despondent, or depressed. Being abused or unfairly treated will arouse emotions which may be harnessed to enhance creativity, but only if these are enlisted as catalysts to awaken dormant potentials. If purely reactive, they are counterproductive, and obstruct this very creative drive. We learn to live with suffering and take advantage of it to sensitize ourselves and develop compassion. 

It's a different principle. Instead of rejecting impressions we feel are disturbing, we are able to transform them, transmute them in our being, and take them in, and that will enrich us. We think of very specific cases where something very disturbing to us keeps bugging us when we're meditating. We keep on thinking about this mean (Page 35) man who is disturbing our lives and think, "It's such a pity, things could be wonderful." There's always the same trouble continuing. 

Now we wonder, "How can I transmute that situation?" First we get into the consciousness of that person, and then we see what place that person is coming from. Of course people are always justifying their actions and of course we all are fooling ourselves. 

 Making States of Consciousness Corporeal 

Do thoughts emerge in me spontaneously, or am I simply reacting to input from outside, boomeranging back impressions customized in my special, original way? Even though I believe my ideas are original, I suspect there is some tacit relationship between them and the residual impressions ingested from environmental circumstances and digested in my unconscious. Rather than acting as an external cause, determining an effect in me, I believe the environmental input acts as a catalyst, unleashing repressed potential idiosyncrasies. 

To what extent the prevailing impressions of current circumstances imprint themselves upon our psyche lies in our ability to balance interest with detachment, downplaying our preoccupation with environmental circumstances so as to highlight the many-splendored richness of our real being regardless of the perturbation due to disquieting circumstances. 
How indelible are these impressions? It is here that the aloofness of the ascetic's imperviousness proves invaluable to downplay them and eventually sublimate them, so that I may substitute the impressions from within. This mirror is two- sided, its two sides facing opposite ways; one facing within, the other without; and the secret of working with it is to close it from one side in order to make it take the reflection from the other. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Esoteric Papers
Forms seen in mirrors, just like imaginary forms are not imprinted materially either on the mirror or in the imagination. No, they are 'bodies in suspension.' 
Suhrawardhi, Vide Corbin, 1977.
The only way to foster a new birthing is, after availing ourselves of the incoming impressions from the environment, to shun the attentiveness they extol compellingly upon our consciousness while letting them spark emotional effervescence in our unconscious. The environment will be processed and transformed and transfigured--in the psychological retort in the deep recesses of our psyche--into a new form, as our creativity. In our creativity of ourselves, we attain freedom from our self-image, and by the same token, from our psychological dependence upon environmental circumstances. (Page 36) 
Certainly the active imagination is the place of apparition of imaginative forms. 
Suhrawardhi, Vide Corbin, 1977.
We may capture these evanescent 'forms in suspense' in those templates of our body that are our electromagnetic field and our aura. These non-spatial forms in the intermediary world have places where they appear (epiphanic places), but they are not contained in them. 
Suhrawardhi, Vide Corbin, 1977, p. 127 & 1973, p. 127.
Turning within, I find it most helpful to try and arouse the evanescent configurations of the light in my aura, observing how instantly and invariably they translate my thoughts and emotions into ever-changing structures, revealing myself to me. 

There is a reflection of the body fallen upon my own mind, but this reflection fallen upon my mind is not only a reflection but an impression. This impression forms into an object, not necessarily into a mental object or a physical object. It forms into an object which is a substance and yet not a substance. In Sufi terms this object which is formed and born out of reflection, this object which is completely like our own physical body, is called Hampta, the 'etheric double.' Everyone sees this in dreams; the thing we see in our dream is this object. 

That reflection only depends upon the object being before it. No sooner the object is removed, the reflection is gone. But the reflection on a photographic plate is like the reflection, but becomes an impression which then can be developed by a certain process in mind.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The secret lies in whether we let impressions imprint themselves willy-nilly in our psyche, like on a photographic plate, or whether we wish to be like a mirror, that can free itself from unwanted impressions by veering away. We can alternately function as one or the other depending upon whether we wish to hold a given impression or not. 

Paradoxically, while we think we need to know our potentials to actuate them, we need to actuate them to discover them. Imagination is action that actuates thought, that operates the transit from the possible into the existential.
Possible things become qualified by existence from behind the veil of the Divine attributes.
Ibn' Arabi
What is more, since creativity is the magic whereby imagination configures an idea into an image, we can only arouse these latent potentialities by imagining the features which we could develop in our personality that could configure what is being revealed to us as we turn within.
Imagination causes archetypal notions to descend into perceptual forms.
Ibn' Arabi, Cf. Corbin, Creative Imagination
By projecting my form before my imagination, I discover it. We longed to escape from prevailing circumstances only to find that our freedom is in our incentive to (Page 37) recreate ourselves as we wish. The multiplicity of beings in the existential world triggers off new possibilities, virtual, not yet operative in the primeval unity (in the state called Hahut by the Sufis), hence our role and privilege as individuals. 

Creativity is where, while sniffing out the trend of the whole, the part affects the whole Therefore each perception of a new meaning by human beings actually transforms the overall reality upon which we live and have our existence, sometimes in a far-reaching way.
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 94.
Divinity resides in humanity; it is also the outcome of humanity.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,
Since we are positing here that we are not only part of the cosmos but an advanced stage of the cosmos, we may inquire whether our knowledge of the universe has some bearing upon the knowledge that the universe has of itself, and whether it contributes to the advance of the whole. 
Human meanings may make a contribution to the cosmos, but we can also say that the cosmos may be ordered according to a kind of objective meaning. New meanings may emerge in this overall order.
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 97.
The question is how our meanings are related to those of the universe as a whole. We could say that our action toward the universe is a result of what it means to us.
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.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Unity of Religious Ideals. 
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. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Incidentally, if indeed we ingest the environment, physical and psychological, do we realize we are transforming the fabric of planet Earth (in fact the galaxies) in our bodies, and the universe (whose body the cosmos is) at all its levels as ourselves? Imagine the cosmos sprouting as ourselves, and the universe awakening in our awareness. This is where our meditation can offer us a chance of looking at ourselves in the cosmos. 

Muse upon the marvel whereby our body, the very fabric of the galaxies, molded in the course of aeons of time by the intelligence of the universe, has been able to produce a brain capable of serving that intelligence so our mind may explore the cosmos that fashioned our brain! Muse upon those emotions that quicken us as we (Page 38) reach beyond our personal joys and pains to attune to the ecstasy of the choreography of the stars. At the level of the psyche, according to the Sufis, the first knowledge is acquired knowledge, the second, revealed. The first is completing; the second is self-sufficiency. Creativity evidences self-sufficiency rather than reliance upon acquisition (the acquisitive faculty of the ego). 

The ideal of life and its progress is to become self-sufficient, and the key to the secret of democracy is self-sufficiency. Spiritual perfection is the second step, the one who has first made himself self-sufficient is entitled in the end to spiritual perfection.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
There are two aspects of fullness: completion and perfection. Every new experience, a thought, an imagination, a principle, an ideal, adds to one's knowledge that makes man complete. At the same time, by trying to be self-sufficient within oneself, void of all things outside, perfection is attained.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 Awakening Qualities 

We are awakening qualities in ourselves, starting from the quality as it is actuated in our personality and getting into more and more perfect dimensions of this quality, what we call superlatives. The wazaif are superlatives. They represent our ability to imagine something more perfect than what we've imagined so far, then beyond that, even more perfect. God is created through our prayers. We create God as ourselves through our prayers.

Here's a practice we can do everyday. Try to grasp our real being behind our self-image, behind our role, our form. When I say "who we are" I mean "who we are becoming" instead of "who we are." We have to be careful because I am fostering the fashioning of thoughts into forms, but let's be wary of sclerosed forms, because it's that which transpires instead of that which is already there. It keeps on transpiring, so it keeps on changing as it transpires. We'll notice, if we do this, there comes a time when something clicks and we all of a sudden say, "Yes, I've seen my real self. It's unbelievable." It's totally different from what we see in the mirror, totally different. 

Behind it all is the whole creative process. Composers or creative people always start with an emotion that is impelling, imperative, and almost compulsive. It is possible situations will act as catalysts to set off this spark, to spark this emotion. For example, Beethoven had a dream. He heard a knock on the door and out of that he made a symphony. That knock was just a catalyst, but it triggered in him a tremendous welling up of the richness of his being, the nostalgia of his being. The whole drama of life came through just because of that knock on the door. It starts with an emotion and it's extraordinary how we are able to translate an emotion to a form.
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This is creativity: how we translate an emotion into a form. In the middle, between these two, is intelligence. For example, the intelligence of Bach is unbelievable. There is no comparison with the intelligence of most people. There is no common criteria, no common denominator. It's super intelligence. Emotion is not enough. Emotion has to be translated into structure, a mental structure and then eventually a physical, let's say, a spatial structure. That is what is called imagination.

See what would be the expression of our face and certainly of our countenance, if we were in a state of reverie and thinking that we're walking along the banks of a lake in moonlight. Our expression, the countenance on our face, would transpire through the muscles of our face and would express peacefulness, the wazifa, ya Salaam. What is important is it's not just the lake; thats only the catalyst. The important thing is the form of our subtle body. This is changing all the time according to our attunement. We can determine our attunement by realizations. 

The first thing is to really have the courage of the expression of our emotions. Acknowledge them and we find that nature has the ability to self-organize itself in us and translate those emotions into form without having to do much about it ourselves. What we're doing is customizing the Divine programming. We mustn't think we have to unfurl the qualities that are lying in wait in our being, but we can decide not only which are the ones we want to pull into our personality, but which we can mutate.

Ya Basit means expanding our consciousness and our self-image. It has to do with our way of thinking. It has to do with keeping in sync with the paradigm shift of our time, the holistic paradigm. I know it sounds like theory but if we break a totality into fragments, every fragment carries within it the totality, potentially. It's a new way of thinking. Instead of thinking of ourselves as a discrete entity, think that the cells of the body carry the code of the whole body. Only very few of the genes are active so there can be diversity. Otherwise they'd all be the same and we wouldn't have an organized body. Think of ourselves in the same way: we are like a cell in the body of the totality. Within the cell most of the potentialities are unknown to us because they are recessive. If we are judging ourselves by what has actuated itself, it represents a very small fraction of ourselves. Its no use telling a person, "You have a lot of potentials you don't know." The person hears that but it doesn't mean a thing unless he/she experiences it. The way to experience it is expanding our self-image beyond what we think it is.

 Creativity as Mutating the Seed, Rather Than Recycling 

My experience now is that life seems to be self-organizing itself around me at all levels, all interrelated. What materializes at one level affects all the others. While surging from the depth unaccountably, ex nihilo, impromptu, without being pre-determined by a cause, the recurring new dispensations of life seem nevertheless to actuate what is being planned and continually replanned at transcendental levels, while taking our initiative--our will--into account. The Divine strategy seems to organize an inscrutable meaningfulness beyond logic, fraught with a sublime emotion beyond joy which corroborates what I feel when I let myself be inspired by my 'quest for the unattainable.'
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The configuration of my imagination into forms offers clues to that intangible meaningfulness that opens up new meanings which I, however, cannot grasp except by the device of imagination. If, by incurring the influence of the environment, physical and psychological, those emergent formations that gel as my body and psyche were to discount the contribution of the formative process manifesting my higher self, I would be missing out on availing myself of the bountiful resources offered me by my Divine inheritance. If while identifying with my personality I try to arouse latent potentialities from the seedbed of my personality, somehow I am limiting the wide spectrum of latent qualities by the very limitation in my self-image.

Therefore, to find fulfillment, we need to include the bounty latent at all the levels of our being. This requires us to shift our notion of ourselves from one level of reality to another. If the plant simply displayed its programmed genes in forms, cyclically, from seed to plant then plant to seed ad infinitum, revolving in the circle of becoming which Buddha calls the samsaric wheel, there would be no progress, it would be repetitiveness. Therefore for there to be progress, its programming needs to mutate. This makes for evolution.

The same God, so little of whose perfection manifested in the plant arises again and again in its pursuit, trying to emerge as perfect as possible in the midst of human imperfection.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

A further factor enters into action, the intelligence of the universe--Divine intelligence--continually evolving, outreaching its records, spurred by its nostalgia--Ishq Allah--upgrading its programming that manifests as the form or features of the plant. The tangent out of the repetitiveness of the samsaric wheel is keeping in mind, in the middle of human tribulations, our purpose, the pursuit of excellence in our psyche, the perspicacity of our understanding, the nobility of our emotions, and ultimately, our degree of realization. This is what we discover as our real self as we hoist our consciousness from one level to the next.
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Malakut

The key to the Malakut plane is to judge things from the point of view of the angel. The attitude we ascribe to the angel is innocence, which mustn't be confused as naivete. We have a lot to learn from our children until they go to school. As we say, truth comes from the mouth of a child. There is no guile. That's where we learn authenticity. 

In our ordinary way of thinking we think we are a spectator and what we are experiencing is other than ourselves. Now we are reaching into higher levels of cognizance which are based on affinity rather than otherness. So the angel will see the angel in us. In the description in the Qur'an of the angels, they aren't judgmental. There have to be two kinds of angels, one that judges our goodness and one that judges our badness. They can't be the same being because an angel doesn't have discrimination. Children don't have discrimination either.

I'm talking about a way of judgment that is not based upon the rational, but more on a heart quality, or a sense of values, or a sense of sacredness. That kind of thing will lift our consciousness, as Pir-o-Murshid says, beyond the Earth plane. We have a feeling as though we were in exile, or in prison, or a kind of constraint of earthly conditions. Yet we must be careful not to denigrate all those wonderful things that are to be found in the world--beautiful music--there are many marvelous things in the world. We have to be careful about having contempt for the world. Our objective is Sufism is awakening in life, not away from life. It's seeing beauty in life.

Working with the Glance

Our potentials encompass a large variety of levels of our many-tiered being. As we turn within, we tend to limit the yield that we appropriate to our personality--squeezing them as in a funnel, curtailing them by our self-image--as we pull them out of the latent state. Therefore, to cull any sense of what these are like, we need to learn how to shift the focus of our consciousness in the transcendent dimension. What are the skills enabling us to achieve this? Behind, or rather above, that sorting-out station of the unconscious lurks what I am looking for, yearning for: spoors of celestial spheres. I cannot wait for it to inspire me; I have to be uplifted to espy it. I need a focus for my conscious act. There is a clue, light. My commonplace experience of light, however delightful, does not meet the objective, although it is a stepping stone. I need to, step-by-step, replace my concept of light as the object of physical experience to it being the fabric of a supernal level of my being, even if it does not fit into the usual understanding of what I mean by light as physical.

I can still indulge in reverie, but light provides the focus. Landscapes, skyscapes of light, yes, unrealistic, shifting, merging unaccountably, but spontaneous, untrammeled from the compellingness of commonplace experience. Impressions flash and (Page 42) sparkle, burnishing in the incescence of purification by fire, when I am shaken by the power of truth, as a test before passing the threshold of angels. I find it helpful to understand this better by visualizing light, because it is matter without mass and it cannot decay, and it is used in scientific thinking as the gauge linking space and time. It seems to illustrate what appears to our commonplace thinking as a middle way between what we imagine to be matter, versus what we imagine to be energy. 

Therefore, while maintaining my concentration on the light beams of my glance, I put particular emphasis on the all-pervading light filtering through those beams, and sparking them with a further dimension of effulgence. Ultimately, I galvanize the light of my glance with the light of intelligence, which is what the Tibetans mean by the 'clear light of bliss.'
A light upon a light.
Qur'an, XXIV, 35. 
Hence the reason why illumination is always associated with awakening. I can see experientially now, that if I dismissed my awareness of the physical light of my glance and just identified with the light of intelligence, I would slip into a trance state. Yes, the sheer discovery of light, physical and non-physical, will shatter us, transfigure us, inspire us, uplift us. Of course testimonials to encounters, interfaces with angels, abound in religious texts. The angelic scene depicted by artists and sung by poets, utopic and legendary as it may have seemed, now reveals its realness if we are in sync with its very special attunement, but on condition of giving up covetousness, resentment, envy, jealousy, unkindness, guile, the quest for personal power. Debris of these linger in the unconscious; it is difficult to overcome them. Our pride in 'the aristocracy of the soul' and our dedication to service of the 'democracy of the ego' is the key. 

I have found practices with light very helpful in order to shift my consciousness first into the perspective from within, and thence aloft. With closed eyes, as a first step, first imagine that we are turning our eyes within by placing blinders to mask the light accruing from outside. 
When ambient light is stronger than the light of sight, man perceives it but does not perceive through it.
bn' Arabi
We will find that the light emerging from within is diffused light instead of radiant light. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls it the 'all-pervading light.' 
Light is of two kinds, a light having no rays, and radiant light. The light that has no rays is the light within which self-disclosure takes place. Then its brightness does not go outside itself.
Ibn' Arabi
As we turn outside, that 'all pervading light' is focalized and radiated as radiant light. Envision our eyes as the two searchlights of a car, but imagine the inner diffused light, which we discovered when turning within, is filtering through those headlamps. (Page 43) 
Hence light becomes included in light.
Ibn' Arabi
For a split second, at the beginning of our inhaling, open our eyelids. The environment will appear as a blur. With a lot of repeated practice, we can train ourselves to zero in on an object (a person, or a flower, or a crystal), without allowing ourselves to slip back into the way our glance is conditioned by the appearance of things. We will be amazed; the flowers look like those photographed by Walter Chapell in ultraviolet light. We will notice they are translucent and surrounded by a corona of effulgence, and if we practice this sitting in front of a person, we will espy the countenance behind that person's face.
The person whose glance is like an x-ray sees through a person. He sees the cause behind the effect.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now, identify with the aura, not just the corona surrounding our body, but internal. Transfer our attention from one chakra to the next, moving up the spine. Towards the end of our ascent, we will feel something like a crown of light above our skull. At this point, hold the breath, and if we have practiced losing our sense of location in space, as we did previously, we will grasp what the Sufis mean by the light of intelligence. Identify with it. The quality of the light experienced is diaphanous instead of effulgent. It is significant that awakening is linked with illumination. A clue would be, instead of projecting the inner light through the glance, infuse it with the lucidity of intelligence (a nonphysical light) through the glance. 
By the power of his glance or by the very magnetism of his presence he kindles to a certain extent the light, if there is any, of the other.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now we're shunting the light of our brain through the optic nerves and out through the retina. We have been able to identify with Divine intelligence, luminous intelligence, instead of our consciousness. Then of course our glance will be very significant to us as it is for the Sufis. So wherever we're walking we feel as though we were thrusting our glance upon all things, like Aladdin with a lamp, like a torchlight, as Pir-o-Murshid said. "Wherever he went he was bringing his light." 

It's a very extraordinary condition to be in. If we remember, we place all of our attention in the light of our glance. We identify with those two beams of light of our glance, with closed eyes, and when we open our eyes then of course the environment is going to force our eyes into focus so we lose our concentration. Then we learn to keep our concentration while we open our eyelids for a split second and eventually longer and longer and longer. Eventually we are able to maintain that sense of our glance. At first the objects seem to be a blur, then gradually we begin to see what we might call the aura of people or the countenance coming through or whatever. That's whatever is transpiring behind that which appears. 
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When we do that, of course we find ourselves in a transfigured world, but its a skill, we can't just switch. I'm saying it's easy to switch over, but we have to do this practice first and then we can switch our consciousness in that other mode. It's best to do it in nature. Don't do it in the street where we could be run over, or bump into people. Now, we are very satisfied with that state and think that this is it of course. Then all of a sudden we think of the words of the Sufis, la ilaha illa 'llah. It's all one. So how can we say God is looking through my glance, if it's all one. Then my glance is the Divine glance. That's why Ibn' Arabi says he is the seer, and also that through which he sees. That is la ilaha illa 'llah. It's all one. 

Now, apply the same principle to the focus of our consciousness. Practice offsetting our consciousness from its usual setting. Having first done the previous practice, we find that we can actually do this. It is as though we discovered a more real reality behind the facade in whose perspective we had been trapped all this time. 

When the light from within is thrown upon this knowledge then the knowledge from outer life and the light coming from within make a perfect wisdom. 

 Our Celestial Counterpart 

There seems to have been defilement, wrought through the battle of life, with opponents, temptations, reactions to abuse. Consequently, if when in a state of reverie, we continue to identify with our etheric body, thoughts belonging to the celestial level of our being will be blurred by this function of psychic digestion. Therefore we have learned to highlight the creative thoughts, first those surfacing from within, then those belonging to lofty levels of our being. After projecting the virtuality within by dint of creative imagination in the existential circumstances, we stumble upon the need to incorporate both the qualities ascribed to the celestial spheres, and earthly qualities, by sublimating them, reversing the distortion in our creativity.

How can we reverse the distortion evidenced in our very effigy? Beauty, whether it transpires through a form, or scene, or scenario, or as a gesture or attunement, provokes an awe for the sacred because of our sense of integrity, of flawlessness, of the sense of the immaculate that it spells and which we feel called upon to treasure and protect.

Discovering those features of our real being will correct the distortion, just as we can correct a habitual mistake in typing, or playing the piano, by repeating the correct version until it becomes automatic. To glorify God as the intangible object whose spoors invite our appraisal of splendor beyond beauty and majesty arouses excellent qualities in our being, which reinforces our uplift, but overcoming the sense of otherness already encountered is carried yet further. We cannot experience the denizens of these planes because they are not 'other;' they are 'other ourselves,' but we can commune with them in ecstasy. They function as the mirror of the angelic counterpart of our being.

At this point, try to grasp the effigy of our aura at the celestial level, fashioned in the fabric of light. When we come upon an impasse in our efforts to shift the setting of our consciousness, it is heartening to be able to resort to a practice and then, using this as a springboard, leap to the next perspective.
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Envision the aura as fashioned in the fabric of a different kind of light from physical light, without a profile, like the corona in a Kirlian photograph. It is extremely rewarding in our meditations to consciously fashion this light-body as a sculptor. We are surprised to find that it does not let itself be configured by our will, but will model itself according to our emotional attunement. The Divine countenance transpires through our countenance in the measure of our resonating to Divine emotion. 
I emanated upon thee a force of love so that you might be fashioned according to my glance.
Qur'an, XX, 39 
Prepare for the emotion of discovering God, the unknown, the unattainable in a flash of splendor transpiring as a form in our own countenance.
Through Thine own eyes, I look upon thy countenance.
Shabistari
It is the power of envisioning splendor, the archetype manifesting in the existential world as beauty and majesty, that lures us beyond the commonplace and sparks the evolutionary advance and sensitizes us to excellent potentialities in our being, which are thus aroused and awakened. Any spoor enlisting our sense of deja vu, displaying splendor in a tangible form--like a dawn in the mountains, a cathedral, sacred music, or the eyes of a baby--will give us some clue as to what is traditionally ascribed to the celestial spheres, and more importantly our own celestial counterpart. The key to culling even the most flimsy whiff of the wonder of this level ascribed to the celestial spheres is in recollecting pre-natal or pre-conceptual states whose memory is normally buried in the unconscious. It is in a state of reverie that this memory is retrieved. Therefore at this point I need to be receptive to the disclosure of an image, which I nurture maybe unconsciously and which strikes me when I am high.

What the soul shows to itself is precisely its own image since the earth it projects reflects the image premeditated by the soul.
Corbin (paraphrasing Ibn' Arabi), in Creative Imagination according to Ibn' Arabi, 1958.
Its splendor bewitches me. How can I believe it is me, the real me? I represent to myself an imaginary master, not one described in the chronicles of history. His/her high attunement, majesty, beatitude, radiance, self-possessiveness, magnetism, outgoing love, serenity helps me to believe in the transforming power of the sacred.

By projecting an imaginary image of the master, we discover our real self, mirrored as it were in this image. The esoteric lore of the Mazdeans, the Manicheens, the Gnostics, the Neo-Platonists and the Sufis recount and reiterate the interface outside space and time, according to Suhrawardhi in the no man's land of figures in suspense, "between two faces of our own being, the human and the celestial." (Nakhoja Abad, Cf, Corbin 1952, p. 82, 1954, p. 27.)
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They describe a kind of initiation into the higher spheres. In a state of reverie, the contemplative espies a being so magnificent that he/she is stunned by his/her majesty and beauty. As that being approaches, he/she becomes increasingly amazed by what seems unbelievable. There seems to be a resemblance! How is this possible? Hermes says to Suhrawardhi, "I am your Perfect Nature."
These two dyads or poles of our being contemplate each other reciprocally. I go towards my likeness; and my likeness goes towards me. He embraces me and holds me close, as if I had come out of prison. 
Drower, The Means of Iraq and Iran, Oxford, 1937, pp. 54-55.

To use a metaphor of Ibn' Arabi, "see Him/Her with His/Her eyes and He/She contemplates me through my eyes."
Eventually the angel avers itself to be the mentor and instructs the adept, "follow me."
Ibid., 1954, p. 43.
Here begins the pilgrimage to whom you are. It requires leaving what you thought you were behind. 
Ibid., 1952, p. 162.
This is an experience that can be induced, albeit requiring laborious and extensive preparation. I sit facing someone. I start by trying to get into the consciousness of the person and envision the way I appear to that person. Now in the absence of any person facing me, I imagine facing myself looking at myself. I imagine I am that person facing me and where I thought I was seated is my aura.
Amongst these forms, you will recognize your own likeness.
Ibn' Arabi
We could not project these features by our imaginative faculty if they were not potentially present at some level of our being. However, they are obstructed by 'the shadow.' God is revealing to us our celestial nature, which is our true being within its defilement, regardless of its defilement, which is much more authentically what God is than His/Her form. A being is much more than the form, than the body of that being or even the subtle body. 

Represent a face to illustrate each wazifa, a countenance to illustrate each wazifa. The countenance of ya Qader is very different from the countenance of ya Qaher or of ya Quddus or ya Hayy. Each one is different and each of these qualities embodies the being of an angel. There's an angel of power, and there's an angel of majesty, and there's an angel of joy, and an angel of peace.
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The real true core of our being, which is immaculate within its distortion, is revealed to us as the being of God. That's how we're beginning to get more and more into the Divine consciousness instead of our personal consciousness. If we thought we could know it, we could reach it. It wouldn't be the Divine consciousness; it would be our consciousness. That's the beauty of this whole paradigm. 

We're not talking about form anymore. We're talking about the being of God, which is like when we want to get to know a person. Yes, get to know his/her body, his/her thinking, perhaps even his/her emotion, but deeper still we start getting to know his/her being. That's what we love, his/her being, beyond his/her external aspects. 

The Sufis say, "I know myself through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through me." In other words, God knows Him/Herself eternally in the principles of His/Her being, but the existential condition adds something to that knowledge of the principles. Exactly like, for example, variations on a theme in music would add something to what was already there in the theme. This is a second form of knowledge that God acquires by discovering Him/Herself as me. The consequence is that we discover Him/Her as us coming through us. 

I can illustrate this state of consciousness. I was with a group of people and we were in search of a great rishi high up in the Himalayas. We found him. It was rather amazing, because at first we couldn't find the cave. I must say that I saw a light  maybe it was his aura--and it directed us towards him. Then we were sitting there, which was very rare because most rishis never speak. One of our members asked him what I would consider a silly question. The rishi descended from his pinnacle of glory. It was such an effort of his to try and understand how a person could think that way. His answer must have been a koan, a paradoxical answer.

There are ways of thinking that are not the logical way of our commonplace thinking, nor even the conscious way of thinking that I have described as we turn within. The kind of thinking that I'm talking about now we might call the reconciliation of the irreconcilables. It's being able to extrapolate. For example each of our two eyes sees differently and our brain extrapolates between those two visions. We can do the same thing with our mind. We can consider thoughts that seem antinomous and somehow relate them by extrapolating them. First we toggle between the two, then we extrapolate them. In order to do that we have to let go, we have to downplay any notion of form. We have to give up the act of imagination, which has been so useful so far. 

This revelation of the qualities in our being can take place because now we are not only enthused by our interface with this wonderful being but somehow we're moved by an act of glorification. We are really very deeply shattered in our soul. This is not just perfunctory admiration for something we value; we're very deeply moved and we realize this being has much more than just beauty and majesty. This being can only reveal his/her qualities to us because they match qualities in us. There's a mirroring effect. What this being is doing is revealing ourselves to ourselves by revealing Himself/Herself to us through the devices of His/Her qualities. 
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Now we are reaching independence. It's not only independence from outside but also from our own thoughts and our own emotions. We can't force ourselves to be enchanted, so it's no use doing ya Azim, ya Azim, ya Azim, and think, that would make us enchanted. It doesn't work that way because for one thing our doubt stands in the way. If our doubt is based upon logic, then of course at some point we can't make sense of things, so we are in the dark night. In some way our emotional attunement is tied up with our understanding, and we're talking about a higher understanding. That means we are prepared to accept that things are quite different than what we thought, than what we think they should be, because to know what makes sense we must get into the mind of God. That is of course what the Sufis are trying to do, but it doesn't happen that easily. This is a kind of threshold situation, in which we discover dimensions of our being we're not usually aware of. Sufis call them the celestial dimensions of our being.

In the state of Malakut our sense of dj vu triggers a kind of memory. We see memory is not quite the correct interpretation because we still are in that state. Therefore, when we say memory, we say, "I remember the celestial spheres." So it's that kind of memory. It is still there, it will always be there, it is not of the nature of transience or transiency. It requires a totally different way of thinking, instead of thinking in terms of becoming, time moving in time from past to future--thinking in a horizontal dimension of time. 

Now here's an important practice. As we breathe in, and when we hold our breath, we have lost the sense of becoming, the sense of the advance of time, what we call the arrow of time, advancing, keeps on advancing. There is the sense of an interruption in the flow of time. These are conditions favorable to discovering something emerging impromptu, non-determined, not causally discerned, and that is creativity. It is going to then have an effect upon the causal train. It's going to alter the cause/effect chain of causality. 
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Jabbarut

We have already learned to shift our consciousness within. Now comes the radical about-turn. We can only establish this connection by trying to see things from the antipodal point of view to our personal vantage point, the Divine vantage point, the heavenly witness.

The breakthrough that marks access to what the Sufis call the Jabbarut level is triggered off by grasping meaningfulness, which is not based upon an interpretation of existential experience or a search for causality or retrocausality. If consciousness is voided of any perception or conception, being resorbed in its ground, which is intelligence, then a meaningfulness is revealed that makes sense of what we could not figure out with our mind. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls it "the reason of reasons."
Ecstasy comes by touching the reason of reasons, and by realizing the essence of wisdom.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we consider our problems while, instead of identifying with our psyche, we identify with our consciousness, we gain an objectivity that will free us from the very personal bias against which we have been cautioned earlier on. Remember that our first step to free ourselves from the bias of our psyche's vantage point was to transform the psyche by arousing and unfurling its seedbed--turning within by the power of creative imagination. Now, we eschew imaginary projections.
Absorb yourself in the Dhikr until the imaginary world escapes you. 
Ibn' Arabi
If we identify with the witness, it will give us an overview. However, our assessment is still limited by the fact that our personal consciousness is the focalization (or convergence) of the consciousness of the universe (the Divine consciousness), and so is our logic.
The pure consciousness has so to speak gradually limited itself more and more by entering into the external vehicles, such as the mind and the body, in order to be conscious of something.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Spiritual Liberty, "Manifestation." 
That is not the kind of knowledge we acquire but the kind of knowledge that is written right into our intelligence. It's rather subtle. The word Jabbar is the bonesetter, like a chiropractor that puts our bones back into place rather forcefully. 

We look at things around us, we see things are out of place. For example, there is the wrong person in that job and we would like to be in that job, but that 's the way it is. (Page 50) That person is there, the wrong person. The right person is in the wrong job and everything seems wrong. It takes a lot of faith to believe it will all settle into order, so our faith is being tested. 

The same thing is true of our minds. That's the reason why our thoughts are random when we are meditating. We think, "I'll never be able to meditate because these thoughts don't make sense. I can't make them make sense by my will or in my usual mode of thinking. The only thing that can make sense of these random thoughts is if I change the notion of the spectator in me."

Remember the key thought, a delightful thought actually, of Najm ud-din Kubra, who talked about the witness in the heavens. What does that suggest to us? How would an angel look at us? Instead of considering the view a person has of us or even that the world is looking at us, as Saint Francis said, imagine if we were able to look at ourselves through the eyes of an angel, how would we look? 

I suppose we would say that is looking at things through the understanding of the heart instead of the understanding of the mind. If we are moved by a very noble feeling, the feeling of the angel, then the way angels would look at us would be those standards of nobility. That would be the criterion. 

 Cosmic Glorification

If we remember, we get in touch with our nostalgia. It's not in the realm of understanding, it's in the realm of emotion. The curious thing is that in order to reach this level of understanding which the Sufis call Jabbarut, we have get in touch with our ecstasy, our nostalgia, Ishq Allah. This is a new dispensation and we can not do it in cold blood. Its only when our attunement is such that by the act of glorification and our attunement the emotions we're experiencing are cosmic. They carry us beyond our personal emotions. It starts by bewondering and it ends by glorification. 

The way to do it is to get into the consciousness of the trees, like Saint Francis walking in the woods. Instead of just looking at the surface of the leaves or the trees or the boughs of the trees, he was getting into the consciousness of the trees. The trees were looking at him. When we do that we have a very different picture of the environment than from our personal vantage point. We are in a transfigured world. We feel like we're walking on air. If we want to be high, we can just switch on something in our consciousness and there we are. 

Even if we say the consciousness of the whole universe is present within our vantage point, if we're not aware of it, then it doesn't mean anything. We want to make this real. We must know we are always seeing things from two antipolar vantage points: our personal and the Divine, which we could call the overview the universe has of itself. Then we learn how to extrapolate between those two. With this bipolarity, we have a kind of dynamic we would not have if we were limited to, we were trying to reach beyond, our personal vantage point. 

Imagine there's this wonderful being whom we don't know; whom we would like to know and who is revealing all the different dimensions of his/her being to us. At first, using devices, then gradually we get more and more into the consciousness of (Page 51) that being, with his/her being. I could even think about some of the great rishis I have meditated with in the Himalayas, or dervishes in Ajmer, or of course Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. That's the first step. Then afterwards we try to imagine what it's like for this to be God instead of a person in whose presence we can be seated. 

When I was wandering in the Himalayas in search of great beings, as my father advised me to do, I was impressed by the extraordinary majesty and beauty of these beings. There was an ashram with a very old guru. They say that he was 108. Hardly anybody went to this ashram and here was the real person. He was silent. I used to go and sit in his presence. All I had to do was look into his eyes, and he was revealing to me the Divine splendor through the light of his eyes. It's two ways. It's not just that we are observing, but there's a revelation at the other end. Consider that, for example, the physical world is the body of this great being. This great being is revealing to us his/her majesty or beauty in the forms of the physical world, the beauty of nature. These two things, majesty and beauty, Jelal and Jemal, according to the Sufis.

The forms of the world are devices through which that being is revealing some kind of clues about something that is beyond those clues. According to the Sufis, that is the Divine splendor, which doesn't have a form but is transpiring through that which appears. We're wandering in nature and all of a sudden find ourselves in that transfigured state. It can happen if we are just at the crest of that which transpires behind that which appears. Then there comes a time when consciousness peters out altogether and that's where the revealed knowledge, the Divine insight into all things, is revealed to us. Particularly ourselves, the way God sees us, instead of the way we see God. Seeing things from the impersonal, antipodal point of view will dismiss our personal bias.
Spiritual attainment is to be reached by the raising of the consciousness from limitation to perfection.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, The Alchemy of Happiness
The Sufi dervishes try to see things from the Divine standpoint. In this perspective acquired knowledge is replaced by revealed knowledge. The way to achieve this consists, as we meditate, in trying to orient our consciousness towards its origin, which is now facilitated by "that process whereby he is able to touch upon that part of himself that is not subject to death." Thus we maintain our high vantage point while surveying the existential world.
In the primal stage of manifestation the consciousness has no knowledge of anything save of being, not knowing in what or as what it lives. The next aspect of the consciousness is the opposite pole of its experience, where it knows all that it sees and perceives through the vehicles of the lower world but is limited by this.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Spiritual Liberty, "Manifestation." (Page 52) 
 Intuiting the Divine Intention 

The Sufis call it being privy to the Divine strategy, being invited to the court of the king and queen, where the Divine intention is intimated in the intimacy of confidentiality (Uns). In the early stages, we looked upon the physical world and the idiosyncrasies of our personality as clues, devices whereby the underlying reality is revealed to us. At the present stage, emancipating our minds from basing their understanding upon an interpretation of these spoors, we have direct access to the meaningfulness engineering existential conditions. At an advanced stage, we learn to grasp God as He is in Himself rather than the knowledge gleaned of Him.
There is a further knowledge: God makes Himself known to us through Himself reveals to us His knowledge of Himself through Himself.
Ibn' Arabi, Kalabadhi, 1981, p. 64.
It is a further mode of knowledge not based upon experience. We could call it an intuitive hunch. At this level, meaningfulness is disclosed regardless of the clues offered by experience. We cannot acquire cognizance of the Divine qualities which we inherit, although they are known to us unconsciously, but they are disclosed to us according to our station (maqam), the place we have reached in our developmental stages.

From the moment we dismiss our identification with ourselves as a discrete individual, we think differently. In fact we think as the universe thinks, but less well, just like the fragment of a hologram. To emancipate our understanding from the limitations of our personal vantage point, we need first acquiesce to the fact that it indeed only gives a restricted insight, and therefore try to represent to ourselves how things would look from the point of view of the universe. We would therefore first ask ourselves whether the universe as a global reality is self-aware, whether behind these fragmented focal spotlights of consciousness, which we assume are our consciousnesses, lies a global consciousness. Shall we at least make allowance for, "What if the universe thinks?" By the same token, or "the planet Earth of which we are participants?"
We are of course referring not just to the meaning of the universe to us, but its meaning to itself.
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 99.
There is a storehouse of all knowledge in the universal mind. If you can touch it, all knowledge that is there in amplitude will be poured out to you with perfect ease.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If physicists have any faculty of gaining insight into the functioning of the cosmos, it is because our thinking is isomorphic (of the same nature) with the universe, just as the fragment of a hologram, which functions as the whole (rather than as a part of the whole), but less well. (Page 53) 
I think as God thinks
Isaac Newton
To overcome the personal bias of our commonplace thinking, we need to grasp our interconnection, ultimately our co-extensiveness with the universe which we commonly imagine to be other than ourselves. The key to 'knowing' is interconnecting with the global reality--the cosmos of which we are holistically a part--and discovering the transcendent dimensions of our consciousness, of which our vantage point is the focalization, and trying gradually to grasp our life situations from that pinnacle of awareness, the intelligence of the universe.

We remember a time when we were enjoying walking in nature, and then we found ourselves in a transfigured state. We thought, "I am the eyes through which God sees, the lens." Then finally we found our glance was the Divine glance. So that's the way. Those are the transitional steps leading to the point where that great being is inviting us to see things through His/Her eyes. We realize that our glance, is His/Her glance. What the Sufis say is that now God invites us to get to know Him without any devices. There is no form. There are no qualities, it's beyond the qualities, just consciousness. When consciousness has been voided of its object--we're not conscious of a physical perception and we're not conscious of a mental conception--consciousness will return into its ground, which is intelligence, as Pir-o-Murshid says. 

 Consciousness Resorbed in Its Ground: Intelligence 

While, where consciousness is active, there is an antinomy between the spectator and the perceived, at this stage there is unity. Since at this stage, having downplayed the perception of the existential world or even our judgment about the way it appears, consciousness, being voided of its object, is resorbed in its ground which is intelligence. Consciousness is intelligence when there is nothing before it to be conscious of. When there is something intelligible before it, the same intelligence becomes consciousness.
Consciousness must always be conscious of something. When consciousness is not conscious of anything it is pure intelligence. Intelligence confined to phenomena becomes limited, but when it is free from all knowledge, then it experiences its own essence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
These lights are gushing forth to illuminate his face. The outpouring takes place between the two eyes and between the eyebrows. Suddenly you are gazing at a person who is also irradiating lights. The opening of the inner sight (basir) begins with the eyes.
Najm ud-din Kubra, in Corbin, The Man of Light, Shambala, 1978
Most importantly, concentrate upon the thought that the light coming through our eyes is that of the heavenly witness; the light that we have spirited operates is simply as the catalyst.
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Every time a flame arises from you, behold a flame comes down from the heavens toward you.
Najm ud-din Kubra, in Corbin, The Man of Light, Shambala, 1978, p. 87.

In the practice of satipathana, the Buddhists devise a method to achieve this transit from the personal witness to the impersonal. First watch what we used to identify with--our body, our psyche--without identifying with them. (Note that this is not being oblivious of them as in asamprajnata samadhi.) Then watch our consciousness as it watches an object or considers a problem. 

Here we may recognize two steps. Instead of thinking, "I am the spectator, the witness, I am the eyes through which God sees." However, if we think thus, we are thinking in terms of duality. Next think, "My glance is the Divine glance (or my consciousness is the consciousness of the universe), the witness in the heavens, but focalized (as through a lens)."

Now we identify ourselves with the witness, not with our psyche. What Ibn' Arabi said was to let go of imagination. Imagination has taken us so far but at this stage it will stand in our way. 

The form at this point is the form of our etheric body, aura, and higher bodies of light. Those are only media through which reality is coming through, what the Sufis call Ayat, meaning these are signs, signals, clues to that reality which we call God, or, clues whereby God reveals Him/Herself to us. At this stage Ibn' Arabi says, we "know God not through those clues but by God himself." That's a real breakthrough. That's awakening. 

This is a very advanced stage, because now we are not grasping reality. We realize that we are ourselves reality. That's why when Christ was asked by Pilate what is the truth, he said, "I am the truth," and that's why al Hallaj was crucified, because he said, "Ana'l Haqq," I am the truth. 

 Reconciling the Irreconciliables 

We stumble upon a paradox which arises out of the difficulty (or nigh impossibility) of earmarking a boundary between our individuality and the universe. By the same token we clearly envision our consciousness as a focalization of the global consciousness. The whole universe has contributed to the way humanity thinks today. If the planet did not have an intelligence, it could not have intelligent beings on it.
The collective working of several minds and the activity of the whole world in one direction are governed by the intelligence of the planet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This arouses troubling queries in our ordinary way of perceiving, that is conceptualizing, the world. No sooner we do this, we find our ordinary assumptions stand in our way and we are therefore called upon to question them and replace them. How can we, for example, reconcile our uniqueness with the ultimate Oneness in which (Page 55) we are included? Our commonplace logic proves inadequate. We are in the throes of super-logic.

How can we reconcile our uniqueness and the oneness that we are? We need a new logic. Our commonplace logic proves inadequate. It stands in our way in our meditation. I find I can only maintain myself in this state so long as I give up assuming that I am the spectator.
"Thou art both thou and not thou," corresponds to a super-logical formula.
P.D. Ouspensky, Tertium Organum, Vintage 1982, p. 236.
Thou art not thou, thou are He without thou.
Ibn' Arabi, Who So Knoweth Himself, Beshara, London 1976 p. 4.
Thou art not Him and yet Thou art Him.
Ibn' Arabi, Fusus al Hikam, p. 34.
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Lahut

So far, I have been downplaying the ordinary perspective in order to highlight the antipodal perspective. Of course I needed first to free myself from the personal perspective. Having achieved this, I may now venture to extrapolate between the two. This could be illustrated by correlating the motionless and unchanging state of the fulcrum of a pendulum with the motion of its weighted end, or between the perennity of the river with the transiency of the water, or again, our programming and our free will.

See if we can grasp the programming of, say, an event, and at the same time see how the intention is actuated in the existential state. First toggle between the two, then extrapolate between the two. So long as I am able to maintain an awareness of my individuality, it becomes clear I have been shifting the focus of my consciousness from my personal vantage point to the antipodal point of view. This is accompanied by my shifting my sense of identity from being an individual to being a condition of the totality, without any boundary between me and the totality (which is the greater me, or rather where the word 'me' has lost its meaning).

We prepared ourselves for this in the previous stage, Jabbarut, where we identified with the cosmic spectator and could see our personal consciousness as a focalization thereof. We now consider another dimension, the transcendental. All we have done so far has led up to this point, but now comes the leap. This means a complete about-turn in our identity, a quantum leap. We are afraid of letting go of our personal identity. This built-in caution serves a purpose; in fact our instinct for self-preservation protects us from simply losing ourselves in a trance state.

Finally, the breakthrough comes. Instead of the physical panorama, we see the physical world as the actuation of a program, like the hardware of our computer as the actuation of its software. The chips and their arrangement are devised to make a program operative at the existential level. Or again, consider that a plant is the actuation of its DNA. Imagine if we could look at our problems as we would if we had enough understanding of how the gene arrangement of the DNA gets transcribed into bodily features. We cannot infer from the features of our body cells what their DNA is like, but from the moment biologists started isolating DNA strands and discovered the link between certain genes and the matching bodily features, a whole new chapter opened in biology.

So it is with meditation. Looking at our idiosyncrasies from an overview will reveal a whole new realization. The realization attained at the previous stage is now opening a whole new perspective on our latent potentialities. Instead of (as at the Mithal level) enlisting just the latent qualities that we tried to capture by arousing them while we were still being encapsulated in our personal self-image, we now espy, and actuate in our personality, qualities which would have otherwise remained as mere (Page 57) possibilities in their archetypal dimension, tentatively written into the Divine programming in the paramount compass of its bounty. This being so, placing ourselves in the vantage point of the Divine spectator as we have learned to do, we envision ourselves as the exemplars of an archetype.

We learn to see ourselves in our relationship to that archetype, never as our personal self-image. Now, instead of trying to grasp the archetype of our being while identifying with the exemplar, we seek to identify with the archetype of which our personality is the exemplar.
There is no thing whose treasuries are not with Us.
Qur'an, 15-21.
Now, instead of trying to arouse potential qualities in the seedbed of our personality, with the intent of substituting these for the jaded qualities in our personality by a fresh dispensation, we are observing them from an overview, and overarching them with their archetypes, thus freeing them from the impoverishment they incurred by being funneled into our narrow self-image. The key to painting a copy of a van Gogh would consist of comparing our painting with the van Gogh model rather than comparing the model with our reproduction of it. In another example, we can imagine the sunflower looking at the sun, and reflecting something of its radiant being, but if we were to look at things from the vantage point of the sun, we could envision the sun looking at the sunflower and rejoicing in discovering something of its nature reflected in the sunflower.

If we downplay our experience of the physical world, our representation of the physical world there, but it is a little bit offset from our consciousness: we can't quite reach it. It is a little bit remote. That's a state which leads to samadhi. We remember how the physical world looks. We remember people, we remember circumstances, the existential state is reduced to memory. It's not there. We remember it. 

If we think our memory is a faulty interpretation of it, then our memory loses its grip on us. It's rather like a dream when we wake up and we remember our dream, but it doesn't seem so convincing anymore. At that time when consciousness, which is receptive, does not have a content it will revert to its source, which is intelligence. We find we have an inborn knowledge and what we are experiencing is only confirming something we already know. Our inborn knowledge is of the principles of things and our experience is of the way these principles are activated in practice. This gives us a clue about the programming behind our life. For example, what are the issues? Now we're talking about something more like the principles rather than the activation of those principles. That's what Ibn' Arabi means by knowing God without the devices through which God reveals Him/Herself to us.

Gradually there has been a shift from personal consciousness to Divine consciousness. We couldn't do it like that all of a sudden. We couldn't all of a sudden try to get into Divine consciousness. We're shifting. We're moving gradually, but it is true there is a moment when there is a real quantum leap from the vantage point of consciousness to that of intelligence. (Page 58) Some people would say, Well this is intuition because we know something but there is nothing in our perception that could give us any reason to have thought this. It just came to us spontaneously." The reason for this is our intelligence is so much a part of the intelligence of the universe that we can't divide it. Our consciousness is a clear focalization of the consciousness of the universe. 

Our intelligence is totally intermeshed. This is why Newton said, "I think as God thinks." We have so many projections in that word 'God,' we could use the word universe; it's very useful to think of the universe as a being and our body as the cosmos and thinking and consciousness and intelligence. Every fraction of a being has the whole being within. It's only a matter of realizing at what level the universe knows itself. Our knowledge of the universe adds something to the knowledge the universe has of itself. It's all part of the knowledge the universe has of itself in the first place. 

We are opening ourselves to revealed knowledge instead of acquired knowledge, and this cuts right into a very deep principle Pir-o-Murshid talks about, the difference between self-sufficiency and acquisition.

 Divine Sovereignty 

At this level, Lahut, our connection with that being, that great being, is that of the vassal with his/her Lord, like in the feudal systems. There's a covenant of fealty, as it is called by the knights. We have pledged ourselves to serve the Lord. It's a particular relationship, like being the ambassador of our government. A person is not a personal person anymore. He/she is a public figure. He/she is representing something beyond him/herself. 

Each person is the ambassador of a quality. Therefore, when we represent our Lord, we need to present his/her qualities. Our qualities need to match those of the Lord, even though they are imperfect in comparison. They are perfect qualities we ascribe to God, because that is the way we are revealing God to the people we are meeting. We are ambassadors. As Tostari says, "The secret of the Divine sovereignty, Qaher, is us." The secret of the sovereignty of the King is because we recognize he's the King. If we don't recognize him then he isn't a King. That is God delivering Him/Herself in to our hands. That's the very paradoxical thing: a powerful being becoming vulnerable for having delivered Him/Herself into the hands of people who have no idea of the value and the sacredness of what is in their hands. It's like Christ being delivered into the hands of his judges.

So the word used by the Sufis is 'the secret,' the Divine secret (Sirr). The words secret and sacred are very close, they are related etymologically. The secret of God is the sacredness of God. The same root is found in the word secretary. The secretary is supposed to keep the secret, in the case of spirituality to uphold the sacredness. Tostari says, "We are the Sirr." We are the secret of the Divine sovereignty. If we are the secret of the Divine sovereignty, then God is the secret of that secret, Sirr a Sirr, the secret of secrets.
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 "I Have Come On Earth In Order To Discover My Spirit." 

Let us imagine we have descended from a sort of eternal and perfect state in order to land on planet Earth. Now, that's a simplified way of looking at it, because if we look at if from the Divine point of view, we can understand that in the Divine exhaling, God descends from the solitude of unknowing in order to actuate the latent potentialities in His/Her being. The power that causes this descent into the existential state is Ishq Allah, which is the Divine nostalgia. It's not love, it's the Divine nostalgia. It's the ecstasy of discovering Him/Herself in all the various facets of Him/Herself. Something is gained by it. We descend into the existential state in order to discover what we are, which we can't discover unless it is projected as the object, known, so there is an extrapolation between subject and object.

As God inhales, God draws the quintessence of that which has been experienced into the unity, so it's kind of an integration into, as I call it, the programming. The power that makes this happen is the nostalgia for freedom, instead of the nostalgia for experience or involvement. We can see those two things in ourselves-a nostalgia for experience, for involvement, for putting ourselves on the line, and then the longing for freedom.

As we exhale, we think our breath is a component of the Divine breath, or the out breath of the whole universe, moving into the existential state. That will justify, in our mind, our need to involve ourselves with people, to improve the comfort of our lives, to enjoy the culture, and build a beautiful world of beautiful people. 

Our involvement curtails our freedom, existentially, at all levels--opinions, emotion--at all levels. There is a tendency to lose our freedom, or, let's say there is a very good chance we will lose our freedom by our involvement. As we inhale we give vent to our need for freedom. At first, we think we want to be free from the circumstances of our lives. (That is why people leave the world in order to become ascetics.) Then, at a further stage of realization, we realize it is not the circumstances that curtail our freedom. We can be free in prison, for example, whereas, the vagabond is not free under the bridge.
See how our mind, our thinking, our opinion, curtails our freedom. We are caught in a point of view, but we see we can free ourselves if we have a very strong wish for freedom. That is in us, freedom from our self-image. We see it is very constraining and misleading, and then we even free ourselves from the personal emotions to be able to experience the ecstasy of the soul.

Then, we see it is not only our self-image, but our sense of 'I' which is a false assumption, because if we don't see it as part of the totality, then it is alienated from its totality; it is misleading. This is the big fana, annihilation; this is the crucial fana.

Then comes the sudden outburst when we realize this notion of the ego self was masking whom we really are, which is the Divinity of the one and only being. That marks a sudden breakthrough, an awakening, and the consequence is the magnetism of the soul. We have to do that in the quiet of our retreat--in a meditation--make that quantum leap. We go through the blackout, and finally, because we can't (Page 60) reach it, it has to be revealed to us. We are totally in the hands of the Divine revelation that we cannot acquire. It is the action of the universe upon the individuality, rather than the action of the individuality upon the universe.

Feel the ecstasy of that awakening! At this stage, it is really untying the balloon from its tether. Now the balloon has to soar, or lets itself soar, upon the wings of ecstasy. We need to give vent to our nostalgia for freedom and also, a kind of impending bliss, which is restrained by our personal emotions. It means just giving vent to our bliss, following our bliss. We find it is like discovering a whole new freedom, endless freedom, boundless freedom. We don't let ourselves be held back by custom, mind, or whatever. We just let ourselves be drawn into that freedom, that ecstasy.

Be kind to our soul. Pir-o-Murshid says, "Loosen the ties." He didn't say cut the ties. It's very close to the fetters of the balloon; they are really cut so the balloon can soar. That is just an analogy. This is a perfunctory approach. The more advanced approach is to schlep the lower self into the higher self in its ascent by transmutation and transfiguration. Instead of leaving our body and the Earth behind, we are transmuting it in our being, because the existential world continues to live in our psyche and that is where we can transmute it. It's like becoming a perfume, when we thought we were a flower.

It is our nostalgia for freedom that triggers off that transmutation, almost like prefiguring life after life, which we erroneously call death. Even at the body level, the electrons are transmuted into photons. We are carrying our existential being upwards in our flight. There is a point at which Pegasus cannot carry Belerophon any further towards the Olympus, but Pegasus has imparted a momentum to the body of Belerophon. There is a point at which this process of transmutation, this underpinning that has become a winged steed, enlisting the feedback of the existential state into the programming, cannot go any further. This is the Lahut stage. 
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Hahut

The Hahut level is exactly the same as samadhi. We have lost sight of the multiplicity because we have down played the multiplicity in unity. All that we are aware of is the unity behind it all. That's samadhi. There are no more devices. The only way this is possible is to lose our sense of individuality, because that would be part of the multiplicity. If we are conscious of being a person who is a form of the unity we are still in the state of multiplicity. That's why al Hallaj said, "It is good enough if God alone affirms his unity and I'm not there to affirm it." 

What is meant by 'the presence' has nothing to do with qualities whatsoever. That is the secret of the mystic: to make God present. That is something Catholics do in the Holy Communion when they make Christ present by taking the host, then holding that host in their heart. It is something of the same nature. It's in our heart, the Divine presence. Like carrying something very precious, of which we have charge and we need to protect. There is a picture of Christ with a lamp around his heart to protect it and He is protecting the lamp with His hands in the storm. This is the sense of carrying within ourselves the Divine presence. In the Jewish faith it is called Shekinah, the Divine presence. 

We get into it very deeply, then wherever we go we are carrying this presence, and people feel it. We don't have to say anything. This is the very advanced Dhikr, when we just say, "Hu." I think of the words of al Hallaj, "Thou art present between my eyelids and in the cockles of my heart." When we are in love our beloved is always present, and the presence of the beloved does not necessarily mean the physical presence because the beloved may not be there physically. At first we think of the qualities of the beloved, but that is tasawwuf, the qualities and forms. Finally there is just the presence.

We're getting to a point which is of course, beyond our understanding, so fumbling with words. The only way we can translate it is in those words like the knower instead of the known. Now we're reaching a further stage. This is what is Pir-o-Murshid means by the being of God, it's a much deeper reality than what we mean by being. At this level God reveals what is called Haqq. That is the reality of His/Her being beyond all those molds whereby He/She reveals Him/Herself to us-well, to the fearless-fragments of Him/Herself.

The next step is the magnetism of the soul. We are familiar with the quickening of the spirit, so we can try to experience what it means to be quickened. I think of, for example, blowing upon a fire that was smoldering and all of a sudden, it bursts into a flame. That would be something like the quickening of the spirit by the power of breath. It is experiencing and identifying ourselves as pure spirit instead of the soul. It's often described as lightening, Vajra, lightening. High voltage and not much wattage. Of course, lightening shatters and brings about a quantum leap, a sudden change of (Page 62) state from one state to another. It's uncompromising. We could say that it is the life of life.

This level of awakening is different from that of the soul. It is the oneness. At the soul level, we still have the unity in multiplicity and the multiplicity in unity, all the different qualities, the archetypes. At this level, there is no sense of multiplicity, therefore there is no sense of the qualities. There is no sense of the fragmentation of the one into the many. We say, "That person has a lot of spirit," the quintessence. It is the magical elixir of the alchemists. That's what Christ meant by the life of life, eternal life. What we are doing is communicating life, eternal life. We have the understanding about the light upon light in the Qur'an Sharif. This is the light of intelligence upon the light of the aura. This is the life of life cast upon life.

We have come a long way from counseling people, working with minds, even working with the emotions. Now we are triggering the catalyst of life, or we are triggering life by the catalyst of life. That is the holy sacrament. Pir-o-Murshid says, "Those who cannot withstand it will be beyond themselves and exposed to the derision of the world, and those who can drink of this nectar will be illuminated. This is why al Hallaj, dying on the cross, said, "I have been invited to the Divine banquet and God has offered me to drink from His chalice, and it is poison. How can I refuse?" 

This is the wine of the Divine sacrament that will either destroy us, because we cannot contend with it, or will transfigure us, operate that quantum leap from the existential state into the state of eternity.
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Tawhid

In the state of awakening in Sufism (in contradistinction to the Yogic asamprajna samadhi), we do not need to give up our personal perspective, that is our personal identity, but always correlate it with the Divine point of view. Since the ephemeral manifests the eternal, may we not infer the eternal qualities by seeing them manifested in the exemplar? Without matching the genes with the bodily features or functions they are the code for, the study of the genes would lead nowhere. Does not the exemplar give some clue as to the archetype? Can we not extrapolate between the two? 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 this knowledge, then the knowledge from outer life and the light coming from within make a perfect wisdom.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Consequently we unfurl the potentials latent in the seedbed of our personality by discovering in them His/Her qualities that He/She reveals to us in them by existentiating Him/Herself as ourselves. The Divine witness is both the witness and the creator of what He/She/we witnesses.

There is yet a further perspective. All of a sudden we see it's all one being. Diversity, multiplicity in unity and unity in multiplicity, Vadhat in Vayhatdiat, Vadaniyat in Sufism, and then Ahad, the unity. There's a multiplicity in unity. Like a chemical where the salt has been dissolved, the multiplicity hidden within the unity. All the unity in multiplicity being able to see God in all things. Be unity in multiplicity. 

 The First Flight of the Eaglet 

As we evolve we develop a passion for the unattainable. Those words of Pir-o-Murshid become increasingly significant, in fact compelling. They embody our imperative longing to overcome limitation. I repeat them to myself. If I had bypassed the stages I have encountered so far, that passion would certainly have switched me into a trance state, and that is precisely what I am wary of. To venture further, unless very perspicacious, our sense of 'I-ness' would be gradually absorbed into the void. Consciousness, bereft of a content, easily vanishes in a swoon. Everything blanks out because unless highly experienced, we are unequal to seeing any meaning. Even the hope that out of this unknown something may materialize is stillborn.

I am trying to grasp what is being enacted behind the moving scenario of life pulsing all around, without losing touch with the existential perspective. I am seeking to awaken beyond life without losing myself in a trance state. I might illustrate this by imagining how Beethoven thought and felt when listening to the Ninth Symphony, the thinking, the striving, the very excitement of making a realistic dream come true. (Page 64) To prefigure the next step, I need to be eminently clear as to the steps I have trodden all along, stepping systematically from one stage to the next.

Pir-o-Murshid defines the developmental stages and points out the steps leading to awakening in life:

1.  There is one view: when a person looks at life standing on the ground.
2.  It is different when he is climbing the mountain. 
3.  It is a different outlook again when he has reached the top.

We see that:

1.  When a person is looking at life and says "I and all else," that is one point of view.
2.  When a person sees all else and forgets "I," that is another point of view.
3.  When a person sees all and identifies it with "I,' that is another point of view again.

Every thing and being which stands distinctly separate may be called an entity, but what we call 'individual' is a conception in our imagination. The truth of that conception is realized on the day when the ultimate truth will throw its light upon life. Then a person will no more speak about 'individual.' He/she will say 'God,' and no more. There are beings, but there is One Being. There are many, but there is only one.

My objective is 'awakening,' offsetting the focus of consciousness from one perspective to another. To avoid being trapped in a perspective, it is good to toggle between awakening beyond life and awakening in life (which is our objective), while remembering the commonplace perspective. Downplay the commonplace perspective, consider it is just the way things look from our personal bias, but not the way things are in reality. The commonplace point of view now seems derisory. At first sight, we never cease to be amazed by the incongruity of situations, of human behaviors, by what seems ill luck, injustice, chances missed by sheer ignorance or misunderstanding. There is no way of unmasking the hoax of the ego's strategy, or understanding the formative process of the personality, by starting with the facts and analyzing them with the mind's inferential capacity.

This is one of the paradoxes encountered by physicists. To account for physical phenomena, we need to explore human thinking. As we advance, we become increasingly convinced that, to make any sense of life, we need to reverse our vantage point and try to see things from the antipodal standpoint. 

I devised a method -- I tried to get first into the outlook of a bee collecting the pollen from the flowers, then the shepherd's dog ordering the sheep about, now the farmer planning his/her harvest, now the banker at the stock exchange, and the finance minister, now the poet surveying the landscape, now the astrophysicist's thinking overcoming our commonplace concepts of location, of time, of causality. Now I try to penetrate into the realization of the Himalayan rishi or the innumerable contemplatives of all times, everyone according to his/her degree of realization. I nurture the conviction that realization can be awakened, enhanced, enlightened.
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To start with, we need to consider extending the range of our purview. The range of the bee does not encompass the choreography of the stars. In comparison, the outreach of the falcon, moreso the eagle, is incomparably vaster. In the usual capacity of our human minds, what we know of space is based upon the configuration of forms. Actually space is only meaningful when we are conscious of matter. Space is landscaped by matter into forms. We can shift consciousness in meditation where the perception of matter falls out of focus. Actually the word 'aloft' is misleading if we still think within the framework of space. Our sense of space is basically linked with the feeling of gravity, which is associated with matter. Thus our commonplace sense of space is replaced by a more sophisticated one, approaching that of the physicist. Space is only meaningful with respect to matter.

I see that my notion of the substantiality of what I think is matter, for example the cells of my body, does impose a constraint on my way of thinking, and consequently upon my realization. Therefore, I find so long as I can keep in mind that matter (and by that I mean the apparent physical scene) is not what it looks like in my ordinary perspective, I can espy the meaningfulness behind it. Bearing this in mind, when astutely aware of my bodyness, the cells of my body seem to be configured to enlist their intentions, their meaningfulness.
Perhaps something analogous to mind might exist in inanimate matter, at least implicitly. 
David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning, p. 20.

 Meaningfulness Beyond Space and Time 

Meditating, we can correlate the program with its support system and observe how they match, while knowing it is the meaning that prevails. Think of music. Those notes, that in their infinite diversity are really an array of frequencies, constitute the language of the thinking of the universe. Reading a text, we are more interested in the meaning of the text than the letters of the words. Such is meditation, the search for meaningfulness. Therefore the first step towards transcendence is downplaying our sense of matter and space. In Buddhism it is described in the first Arupa Jhana.
Completely transcending perception of form, losing a sense of multiplicity, the ascetic thinks infinite ether, and reaches the plane of infinite ether. 
Majjh, XIII, LXVI.
Recollect that we encountered this state earlier when turning within. It is just like escaping from the prison in which the mind has condescended to constrain itself. Yet make sure that the commonplace notions are still there at the edge of our consciousness. Our house is not a prison if, after leaving it, we know we can return to it. In it we find refuge in confinement. Admittedly the loneliness, the endlessness of the no-man's land, is overwhelming and threatening to the personal sense of safety of the 'I,' while something in us may be craving for 'yonder,' for the wide space, the mountain fastness, sidereal reaches.
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Our sense of bodyness exercises constraint upon our identity. Earlier it was helpful to think of it in the wider perspective, as a condition of the fabric of the galaxies.

For the next step, it is not simply identification with the body that proves confining, but identification with the psyche, still more misleading. Impressions emerge, not just from the physical scene, but the human scenario, the human melodrama. Here the constraint is related to time rather than space, and to mind rather than matter. Freedom from this even more deceptive constraint may be gained once more by questioning our assessment of our situation where we may well suspect the effect of the personal bias. The secret of freeing ourselves from this bias consists in watching our thinking about our problems rather than watching our problems. We notice that our thinking proceeds ahead as a continuity in change, that our consciousness is like an advancing flame that needs a combustible (Buddha), whereas the consciousness of our consciousness (Aql, intelligence), is not constrained within the time dimension of becoming; it is eternal. This is described by Buddha in the second Arupa Jhana.

The ascetic thinks 'infinity of consciousness' and thus reaches the plane of 'infinity of consciousness.' 
Majjh, XIII, LXVI.

Pondering upon who we are, we notice some continuity in change, not only in our body, but in our psyche. Hence we will experience what is meant by perennity. Then realize we are still now, in addition to our physical frame or psyche, what we remember having been prior to our birth, which Stanislav Grof calls our 'peri-natal' dimension (Grof, Beyond the Brain, 1985). Then capture a sense of 'being' beyond 'existing in time-space,' of having been (rather than having existed) prior to our birth or conception. Now turn towards the future, while maintaining awareness in this bird's eye view, prefiguring 'life after life.' We can envision perennity not just as horizontal but vertical, moving from transiency into everlastingness.

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.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

This is the sempiternal survival of the essence of our being. It has a beginning in time, but no ending. Beyond this, we may grasp the overarching of the process of becoming, eternity, without beginning nor ending.
The Sufi practices that process whereby he is able to touch upon that part of himself that is not subject to death.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Indeed, if we eschew converging the consciousness of the cosmos by constraining it within the focal center of our personal consciousness, then the consciousness of the cosmos will come through in its consternating outreach. (Page 67) 
You will see that it is at the same time the perceiver and the creator of the perceived.
Mandukya Upanishad, Adyar, 1952

This is the reason why the Sufis seek this state to enhance personal creativity, customizing the creativity of the universe by personal incentive. Remember we are looking for awakening to enhance our creativity.

 Steps to Awakening 
In the thought: non-existence, the ascetic reaches the plane of non-existence.
Mandukya Upanishad, Adyar, 1952
As we have seen, our consciousness rests upon perceiving matter, physical events, even life fields, and conceptualizing thoughts, ideas, circumstances, values, emoting. This holds us in the perspective of the existential state. When we offset our consciousness from these perspectives, all of a sudden the memory of not only the celestial, but the transcendent conditions re-emerges.

What do we mean by transcendence? A way of articulating what could make sense to our categorizing minds to account for what we mean by 'higher planes,' or transcendence, is that there is more in the plant than the seed, and the trunk, and the branches, and leaves, and the flowers, and the fruit, even the perfume; there is the 'beauty' of the flower. Sometimes majesty comes through. While beauty rests upon its underpinning, its form--which does involve matter and is a configuration of space, even upon the dung upon which it feeds--has a reality of its own, even as a symphony is a reality whether played or not. At the level we have reached so far there is still a sense of form, but without profile. It is transfigured, sublimated, as indeed we envision the celestial spheres, and by the same token, our own celestial counterpart.
The ascetic reaches the plane beyond consciousness and nonconsciousness.
Mandukya Upanishad, Adyar, 1952
As we now know, the Sufis call this intelligence, the level of Jabbarut, the ground out of which consciousness emerges. Once more, I need to heed the fallacy of blanking out. Therefore I must ensure that my consciousness, bereft of perceiving and conceiving fleeing thoughts, be replaced by a paradoxical inborn sense of meaningfulness not based upon experience, whereas meaning is based upon experience. It is a faculty that only enters into operation when we have given up trying to sort things out, intent upon understanding. This is the dark night of understanding of Saint John of the Cross.
Knowledge is a veil on the known. 
Ibn' Arabi  (Page 68) 
Moreover, to avoid blanking out in a trance state at this stage, I need to check that the meaning of things for my commonplace mind remains at the edge of my reach in the twilight of consciousness. Here is the cessation of the determined. This is the final awakening, the heroic victory over determinism, hence the ultimate freedom so long and painstakingly sought after.
It is an initial state which is not governed by mechanistic law, but is the precondition of law, the chance substrate upon which it is built.
Speiser, Uber die Freiheit, Basler Unversitaetsreden, 28, Basel, 1950, p. 41.
Can we contrive to challenge syllogistic logic by toggling between this inaccessible pinnacle of realization and the personal perspective? Then, can we extrapolate between the two? That is the state of the dervishes called Tawhid.
Thoughts shift from the perception of the senses to the imaginary ones, then the intelligible thoughts will descend upon you in the form of perceptions.
Ibn' Arabi 
It would be a contradiction to testify to the oneness while being conscious of being the one who affirms it.
Al Hallaj
How does realization affect the formative unfurling of our ego? How does the sun affect the burgeoning of a seed? How does our soul affect our mind? How does our realization affect our thinking? Much as we might wish to figure out a way of upgrading our psyche, it now becomes clear that the unfurling of our potentials is a function of our realization. However much we might try to upgrade our personality, it will only change under the impact of consternating insights into the meaningfulness of our life, actually of life in general. These hurtle upon us like lightning, undeterminably, unexpectedly, shatteringly, overwhelmingly.

 The Breakthrough 

Imagine: all my life I had prided myself on what I thought were valid theories (theoria means envisioning) about the universe as a being of which the cosmos is the body, whose intelligence flashes through our thinking and emotion, and who sparks ecstasy and despair in the cosmic drama. I recalled remotely all those religious beliefs based upon anthropomorphic projections of what we imagine God should be like, even tolerating His/Her whimsically fingering the puppet show of our destinies. I had prided myself on unmasking the hoax of superstitions, dogmas, conditioned by dint of our education, then taken for granted unless reconnoitered (though admittedly our modern world is debunking a lot of myths).

Now, suddenly, rather than dismissing all of this, I realize it acted as a lead; all that has been questioned has served to reach this breakthrough. What is more, the ladder is still there, even if I have no need of it anymore. How can we find the reality in the state of unity beyond existence without the 'favorable circumstances' offered by (Page 69) the existential state? Can we capture reality where the existential support system simply triggers off the unveiling as a catalyst?
O Thou who are absent there, we have found Thee here.
Abd el Karim al Jili, Insaan al Kemil, tr. Burckhardt 1983.
We have been seeking understanding, knowledge, but do we know the knower? We have been listening to the music, but do we know the composer?
How much more important the knower than the known.
Niffari, Wakif & Mukhatabat, tr. A.J.Arberry 1935.
Indeed the music is an incorporation of the composer's being, just as the cosmos (us included) is an incorporation of the Mighty Composer whose being eludes our grasp. Regrettably, we cannot reach the composer authentically through his/her compositions. Likewise, all the mental representations that we would like to make of the Great Composer fall short of the reality of His/Her being. Yet, surveying the music from the vantage point of the composer would yield a totally different insight into his/her music. Maybe this is the passion for the unattainable. Can we try as far as possible? Yet beware that we run the risk (unless very perspicacious) of losing sight of the Composer by the sheer excitement of getting to know Him/Her. What do we know even of the people we are acquainted with and claim to know? In our ordinary experience, to know is to represent the 'known' as 'other' than the 'knower.' We ordinarily think in terms of duality, but here at the summit, all is one.
Where there is duality, whereby can the known know Himself?
Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad
How can we free ourselves from the prison of the mind? By the magic spell of unconditional love, to be in love with love. In the ecstasy of love, the antinomy lover/beloved is overarched.
I am He whom I love; and He whom I love is I. We are two spirits dwelling in one body. If thou seest me, thou seest Him, and if thou seest Him, thou seest us both.
Al Hallaj, Nicholson, 1975
We normally assume that the lover loves the beloved, but for the Sufis, the human lover makes the Divine Beloved into the 'worshipped One,' Ma'abud, responding to the act whereby the Divine Lover makes the human being the 'loved one,' Mahboob.
I emanated upon thee a force of love so that you might be fashioned according to my glance.
Qur'an, XX, 39 (Page 70) 
In his prayer, he reveals his heart to the Divine being in the very form in which God reveals Himself to him.
Corbin, Creative Imagination according to Ibn' Arabi , 1958
By dint of glorification, in the realm of the sacred, love is no longer polarized in an egalitarian antinomy, but becomes a hierarchic overarching of antinomy into a synarchy.
The aristocracy of the soul and the democracy of the ego.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now, instead of trying to get into the consciousness of the Composer through His/Her music, we are peering into the music through the Composer. If we see our circumstances in the light of the (albeit inscrutable) Divine intention, we can correlate our intention with that intention, illuminate our understanding with that understanding, and let the love stirring our being in its depth reciprocate the Divine love.
There is a stage at which, by touching a particular phase of existence, we feel raised above the limitations of life, and given that power, and peace, and freedom, that light and life which belongs to the source of all being, but is dissolved in it. It is just like touching the presence of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Composer is the repository of the intention. It is only by dint of glorification that we can reach the Composer. The composer (the Composer) is not his/her body, or mind, or psyche, personality, will, even realization. His/Her being is the nature of what Buddha calls the 'nonbecome.' In the state of Nirvana, our minds can grasp splendor irrespective of any support system. This is the deathless state of which Pir-o-Murshid speaks.
The cycle of rebirths does not lead to the deathless.
Buddha, Sannyuttt, II, 179.
Only that which has no birth does not perish. 
Digha XVI, III, 48.
Illumination is the flash in which, beyond all time, this presence without a past is apprehended.
Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening, 1951, p. 241.
The Sufi practices that process whereby he is able to touch upon that part of himself that is not subject to death.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 71) 
Recycling, mutating, and perfusing make for evolutionary advance and, by the same token, the upgrading of our personality, but spirituality harbors a magical sortilege that triggers off a momentous quantum leap, a radical change of state. There must be something gained by the existential state of the universe. The seed of a plant is not just recycled; it may mutate. The perfume? Whether an orchid would grow more beautiful if perfused by its own perfume is not known to me, but it makes exciting sense. We have seen that beauty and majesty need an infrastructure that manifests as form.

 Introducing Meaningfulness into Life 

We are introducing into life the life of life, a meaningfulness beyond meaning, an extra-samsaric element beyond the framework of the dimensions of space and time, the trail of causality. Thus only can we free our consciousness from the objectivity that confines it, to discover ourselves as the Composer we were seeking. This is the sidereal outreach, spelling the freedom so longed for.

While it might be exciting to upgrade the evolution of a plant by injecting it with the perfume of its flowers, we are dealing here with a totally different level of reality, irrespective of the horizontal evolutionary dimension of time and free from the constraint of space. It has, and it continues, to spark life. It is the legendary philosopher's magical stone. It is not the perfume, the quintessence distilled out of the life process; it is not the code of the DNA upgraded by mutation in the evolutionary advance. It is the deathless state.

The challenge is injecting this 'life of life' into life. This is the Vajra (lightning) of the Tibetans. The catalyst simply triggers off latent forces lying in wait. It is not of the nature of the causal chain of determinism, moving in the advance of the evolutionary process. We could call it timeless though it impacts the process of becoming. Upgrading our nature by evolving gradually and painstakingly, overcoming the reactive and acquisitive strategy of the ego and substituting for it the qualities that lie in wait in the seedbed of our personality is a slow process, but if we introduce the flare of the insight of realization through awakening beyond life, this will trigger off a revolutionary breakthrough.
I have not found another than myself in my extinction and in my perennity.
al Hallaj
One finds at the end of the journey that the destination was himself. The soul manifests in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of manifestation, and yet not lose its way by regaining its original freedom, in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world. True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 72) 
In man is awakened that spirit by which the whole universe was created. At present there exists in the world only a belief in God; God exists in the imagination, in the ideal. If there is any sign of God to be seen, it is in the God conscious being. The purpose of the soul is that for which the whole creation has been striving, it is the fulfillment of that purpose which is called God-consciousness. The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man and this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened. When man has awakened to that part of his being which represents God Himself. How is higher consciousness attained? By closing our eyes to our limited self, and by opening our heart to the God who is all perfection, in heaven and on earth, within and without, the God who is all, visible, audible, intelligible, and yet beyond man's comprehension. Spiritual attainment is to be conscious of the Perfect One who is formed in the heart. It is the consciousness of the God who is never absent that gives that illumination, that riches, that strength, that calm and that peace to the soul for which the soul has taken the journey through this world of limitation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Excerpts from The Sufi Message of Hazrat Inayat Khan.
 (Page 73) 
Synopsis -- The Nine Steps
According to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan and the Ancient Sufis

Moving from resorting to the perfunctory strategy of what is construed as our ego, to weaning reliance upon reactive behavior, to enlisting hitherto unexplored faculties in alternate dimensions of our being.
Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

How to discover and identify with dimensions and levels of our being:

 1)	Nasut. Expanding our body image and self-identity to our holistic co-extensiveness with the cosmos and universe. 

 2)	Khayal: 	Correcting our biased assessment of our life situations. Uncoupling our consciousness from our identification with our psyche. 

 3)	Arwah: 	Emancipating ourselves from our perfunctory body consciousness by discovering and identifying with its subtle (etheric) template. 

 4)	Mithal: 	Shifting our thinking from interpreting occurrences and opinions (acquired information) to emergent thoughts, projecting our formative growth process in images (creative imagination), translating emotions and thoughts into imaginary configurations. 

 5)	Malakut: 	Honoring the immaculate core of our being (the child within, the celestial level of our being unscathed within its defilement in our psyche) by reviving peri-natal memory. Giving vent to the need for the sacred. 

 6)	Jabbarut: 	Emancipating ourselves from the limitation of the minds rational inferential logic, by grasping the "reason of reasons. Shifting from information processing to awakening an inherent pre-experiential knowledge. Downplaying the passive act of consciousness (thereby overcoming the duality subject-object by accessing the intelligence of the universe) pre-empting information. 

 7)	Lahut: 	Grasping the programming of the existential state (the universal code, the seeds of existence), the engendering of possibilities and our participation in the programming. Discovering and identifying with our inheritance at a universal scale (called the Divine inheritance). 

 8)	Hahut: 	Awakening beyond the programming. Adopting the vantage point of the knower behind the known, the composer beyond the music, the Being beyond the conditions assumed by the Being, whereby He/She reveals Him/Herself to Him/Herself, including to each fragment of Him/Herself. 

 9)	Tawhid: 	Awakening in life. The overview: espying the way the intention behind occurrence works its way in the scenario of the human drama, we, as the fulfillment of the Divine purpose. 
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Synopsis -- Fana - Baqa

Nasut

Annihilation (absorption) of the subject (psyche) in the object (God manifesting as the cosmos)

fana bi'l madhhur 'an al dhakir

I espy God through perceptual clues.
God reveals His/Her nature through clues in the cosmos.

Khayal: Annihilation (resorption) of the object (cosmos) in the subject (psyche).

fana bi'l dhakir 'an al madhhur

I espy God through clues in my idiosyncrasies. 

God reveals His/Her nature through clues in my personality.

Arwah: Annihilation (dissolution of) the object (God revealing Him/Herself as our psyche) in the (furtherance of) the act (discovery of the seed of our psyche).

fana bi'l dhikr 'an al madhkur

I know myself through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through me.

God knows Him/Herself through the knowledge that I have of HimlHer.

Mithal: Annihilation (deployment) of the act (imagination seed) in the (furtherance of) object (psyche). 

fana bi'l madhkur 'an al dhikr

I espy God brainstorming through my creative imagination God reveals His/Her nature to me as it evolves by dint of my creative imagination.

Malakut: Annihilation (dissolution) of the subject (spectator) in the (prevalence of) (the Divine existentating) act.

fana bi'l dhilr 'an al dhahr

God knows me through the knowledge that I have of HimlHer at the celestial level. 

I know God through the knowledge that God has of my knowledge of Him/Herself.
 (Page 75) 
Jabbarut: Annihilation (sublimation) of the (Divine existentiating) act in the (prevalence of) the subject, (the Divine spectator).

fana bi'l dhakir 'an al dhikr

God reveals to me the knowledge that He/She has of Him/Herself irrespective of the cosmos. God knows Him/Herself irrespective of the cosmos.

Lahut: The persistence of the object (the Divine programming).

baqa bi'l madhkur

Thanks to my insight into His/Her knowledge of the archetypes (Sifat) of His/Her Being, God is moved to bequeath upon me a trans-existential matrix of being, adumbrating my existential inheritance.

By grasping God's auto-contemplation of the archetypes (Sifat) of His/Her Being, irrespective of the cosmos, I make God (originally a virtuality), into a reality through me, in me, as me.

Hahut: The persistence of the subject (Divine intelligence).

baqa bi'l dhakir

My knowledge of God irrespective of the cosmos is God's knowledge of Himself irrespective of the cosmos.

Tawhid: The persistence of the act (the Divine being).

baqa bi'l dhikr

I see God's intention in the cosmos. 

God reveals to me His/Her intention in the cosmos.
 (Page 76) 
Overview Of The Developmental Stages According to the Sufis (Maqam) 

The Sufis distinguish steps leading to awakening:

All we know of reality is through 'signs' such as we perceive in the world.

That which transpires through that which appears (which are subtle signs).

The hallmark of Divine qualities in our very personality (these are also signs since the exemplar reveals something of the nature of the archetype). 

Now we reverse our consciousness to try to grasp God discovering His/Her being through the way we actuate His/Her qualities in our personalities.

Then through our knowledge of His/Her knowledge through us.

The Divine thinking is disclosed directly without signs. Thus we know God by discovering God as the archetype of the qualities which we exemplify in our personality, and we know ourselves by projecting upon God the very qualities which we exemplify, but as superlatives represented as perfect.

 Nasut 

a) We believe that we are the spectator:

b) Reality seems to be composed of objects or particles (discrete building blicks).

c) We identify with our consciousness, our psyche and our body.
We shall show them the signs at the horizon of themselves.
Quran
Trauma, Responses, Resources, Growth

Attachment:  Body well-being, comfort, security, leisure, partnership, self-image, good looks, clothes.

Detachment: Body deprivation.

Practice:  The Sufis consider the body as the 'temple of God.' Therefore, to become a pure channel of its sacred function, which is to embody the Divine presence, it needs to be cleaned and preserved from any deprivation. This temple is intermeshed with the whole cosmos. The dervish awakens this connection by the motion and whirling of the Dhikr.

Method:  Freeing from skin-bound image intermeshed with stars--ya Basit (extending, broadening). (Page 77) 
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, it sunders attachment. Every atom turns bewildered and it is only God circling Himself. 
Rumi
Dependence:  Food, protection, sensory stimulation, instinct of reproduction, partnership, the family unit.

Addiction:  Tobacco, drugs, music, TV.

Practice:  The weaning must be gradual to avoid withdrawal symptoms. Ascetic practices, fasting, wake up at night to meditate, silence. Equanimity. Awaken desire for freedom from dependence, from conditioning, (this is the shift from Pir-o-Murshid's 'completion' to self-sufficiency) - ya Wazi (all encompassing), which give s independence - ya Mughni (bountiful). Need for nurturing - ya Rezaq, countered by collecting what we need by achievement - ya Wali (mastery). Emphasize the enhancement of self-validation by practicing mastery.

Frustration:  Attention to the need of overcoming the obstacles (removing stones or branches of trees on the road), ya Ghani - ya Nafi (propitious).

Resentment: body discomfort, pain, to be manhandled, aggressed, abused. Think of the women lynched who said, "You can do what you like to my body, but you can't touch my soul." (The discovery of the 'deathless state' is met at the Lahut level, ya Baqi - everlasting.)

Aggression: A basic survival instinct when attacked - the 'fight or flight' instinct sparked by fear. The martial arts teach incapacitating the aggressor rather than countering. Reactive behavior can, in extreme cases, lead to cruelty - ya Matin (firmness) - ya Rahim (compassion), or ya Qaher (sovereignty) - ya Rahim.

Guilt:  Though ascribed to a defilement of the psyche, it can spill over into assuming there has been a soiling or tarnishing of the body - a pathological complex. Important: to realize that immaculate state within distortion can never be tarnished, ya Quddus (pure spirit) - ya Mawjud (existence).

Concupiscence:  We easily become the custodian of what we possess, which robs us of our freedom. It is a form of dependence and can become compulsory, addiction. The way of the ascetic is clearly distinguishing 'need and greed' and reducing possessions to 'need' as a support ofr service, ya Muqit (provision) - ya Ghani (to facilitate the journey). This depends upon our own evaluation. Pir-o-Murshid:  "loosen the ties of the world." (Page 78) 

Values:  The values entertained at this basic level are staunch reliability, cleanliness, orderliness.

Energy:  Discounting the energy at other levels in the healing process of the body is neglecting resources that can only be accessed at the levels we shall be exploring.

God/Man: At this level, God is considered as 'other,' 'up there' somewhere; we need to obey His commands and abide by His laws, ya Ali (most high) - ya Badi (incomparable), His laws.
God makes Himself known by projecting His shadow. This shadow is Him and not Him at the same time. Know whereby you are God and you are other than God. 
Ibn'Arabi

 Khayal 

If we modulate our consciousness to the psychological perspective (Khayal), 

a)	The spectator in us projects its personal perspective upon events.

b)	The object of our cognizance is our psyche, or thoughts, or those of others.

c)	We identify with our consciousness and our psyche. 

Behold the world entirely comprised in your self. The world is man and man is the world. 
Shabistari

Consciousness: We confuse the subject in us - the witness--with our psyche, difficulty in distinguishing between the two. 

The knower identifies with the known, while knowing remains. 
Eliade 

Consequently, we do not realize that our judgment is biased by the false notion of our psyche ascribed to the 'I.' It leads to a valid, yet incomplete and consequently misleading statement, elementary and regrettably simplistic. It is like assuming we have seen Notre Dame, but we have only seen it from one angle. Wisdom arises by scanning the existential state of reality, having freed our consciousness from the mind-games, ya Mawjud (existence, actuality) -- ya Hakim (wisdom).

Thought grasps the form of the object directly without the help of categories, illusion, and imagination; done away with impression samskara all antecedent mental functions are destroyed. Consciousness is no longer tied to a name and form. 
Eliade (Yoga)
 (Page 79) 
Realization: At this level, we think we are the subject experiencing otherness and are convinced that our interpretation of experience is correct; understanding is perfunctory, simplistic.

Step one: Observing the physical environment or our situations, problems and interpreting them.

Step two: Observing our thoughts and emotions that reverberate the outer situation; the mind becomes the object of our cognizance.

As we start meditating, we become more intensely aware of how the body feels, of our random thoughts, of our personal emotions and concerns. Many of us have difficulty in getting in touch with how we feel. As seen from the personal vantage point, this yields valid, albeit incomplete, information regarding our assessment of ourselves. Particularly, our self-image needs to be completed, enriched, and upgraded as we grow and advance in the developmental stages. It is necessary already at this stage to bear in mind that, while the vantage point of the universe is funneled down, focalized in our vantage point, we are not yet currently aware of it. It is our objective to become more and more conscious of it. Even at this point, unless, at the start, our view is considered as relative, it could aver itself to be misleading because it is based upon a faulty self-image. Pir-o-Murshid defines a faulty self-image as a faulty representation of whom we are--the false ego--a feature of the strategy of the elementary reactive defense mechanism.

The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

No doubt the transpersonal is inherent in the personal and the 'everywhere and always' is present in the 'here and now.' Pir-o-Murshid says to find a universe in ourselves rather than further encapsulating ourselves in our personal self-image.

It is not self-knowledge that leads to God knowledge; it is God knowledge that leads to self-knowledge.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The way out is extending our consciousness and self-image beyond this limitation, ya Shahid (the witness)--ya Basit (the expander).

Emotion: At this level is pleasure, satisfaction. Limited by this perspective, a sensitive person would feel uncomfortable with the pleasures of the world, while dear ones have suffered so much, yet are hankering for personal needs. We are wary of any touch of bliss that would rest on a worldview that, in our doubt, seems utopic. We cannot force ourselves to be blissful if it does not ring true. The way out of the conundrum is by encompassing wider perspectives, Khabir -- Wazi (wider knowing), and embracing a more comprehensive self-image by discovering our true self, Latif -- Basit (extend awareness to subtle bodies).
 (Page 80) 
Values: As we turn within, while still in our personal identity, we entertain the need for accomplishment, achievement through mastery--ya Wali; to redress disorderliness into orderliness, ya Jabbar.

Guilt: Checking on our activities, we become increasingly aware of the need for fairness--ya Adl (the just)--ya Hasib (or ya Muhsi--the reckoner).

Attachment: At this level, attachment is to being loved. The need to love is a further step to the emotional dependence upon being loved. It is only at a more advanced stage that the need for reciprocation is overcome so we love irrespective of whether or not love is reciprocated, ya Wadud.

Dependence: We become very concerned with our self-esteem and are vulnerable if slighted. We become dependent upon aesthetic values: culture, music, poetry, nobility, elegance. In addition, our psyche needs to enrich itself through the exchange with kindred beings. Failing this, many people suffer from loneliness (except staunch ascetic characters). If this need manifests solely as dependence, rather than a reciprocal exchange, people tend to shun us. This worsens the sense of loneliness to the extent that some sink into a depression. Bringing home to the pupil the need to give, to do something for the other, can only reverse this trend. As seen previously, the pupil needs to expand the compass of his/her consciousness to encompass that of the other--ya Basit (to expand) and ya Wazi (to encompass, to embrace). Also, we need to respond -- ya Mujib, to the suffering of the other instead of being encapsulated in our own poverty, ya Rahman -- ya Rahim or ya Halim.

Covetousness: At this level, we covet praise, appreciation, status, rank, ambition, competition, vying with the 'Joneses,' power over others.

The reactive strategy: At this stage, we are still resorting to the perfunctory instinctive reactive strategy based upon our false notion of ourselves: the psyche manifests its alarm signal at the trauma of psychic pain by resentment. At this stage resentment is triggered by being put down, ostracized, humiliated, abused. Pain is natures way of pointing out through an alarm signal that there is damage, unless something is done (like in the case of a toothache). The self-esteem of the pupil is being impaired by being violated. Being abandoned in this condition is devastating, and makes the victim highly dependent. The teacher now needs to provide a safe and caring containment for the vulnerable emotions of the pupil to 'safeguard' his/her pride, rather than condemn the very natural resentment, even though the resentment may make them feel uneasy. This is where the weaning from the reactive strategy of the ego needs to be fostered gradually, painstakingly, wisely. Rebuilding the pupil's self-image to its initial state prior to being impaired is not making use of the energy unleashed by the trauma. We can turn the tables on the trauma by being better, stronger, and wiser after the trauma than before. Laura, a patient said, "I cannot come back through the same door I came in." To enhance the self-image, we need to foster its growth which entails calling more potentials lying in wait in the seed bed of our personality so they may surface. This is what we shall be proceeding to do in the next two stages.

The Sufis distinguish between restoring--ya Mu'id--and galvanizing regeneration--ya Muhyi--therapy and creativity. 

 (Page 81) 
Arwah

If we modulate our consciousness to the introspective perspective (Arwah):

a)	We identify with our life field (subtle body or electromagnetic field).

b)	We adopt a holistic vision of the world: everything intersperses and is interrelated with everything else.

c)	Our notion of being the spectator intermeshes with that of others (eventually in undifferentiated cosmic consciousness),

d)	we become more aware of our implicit mode of thinking, rather than the analytical.
The order of the world as a structure of things that are basically external to each other comes out as secondary and emerges from the deeper implicate order. 
David Bohm 
The one who tunes himself not only to the external but to the inner being, and to the essence of all things, gets an insight into the essence of the whole being; and therefore he can, to the same extent find and enjoy even in the seed the fragrance and beauty of the flower. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
It would prove counterproductive to wean the ego from its reliance upon the reactive strategy written into its defense programming if we are not yet apprised of our potentials. We need to be able to pull them into our personality so we may identify with them. It would be like relying upon a lifejacket to swim. We must trust ourselves to rely upon our own ability to ensure the buoyancy of our body. In the first steps of meditation, our thoughts reflect the occurrences in the physical and psychic environment. Our psyche is both ingesting and digesting them. However, as in the case of the digestion of food, our body produces enzymes. Even so, our psyche is present within our assessment of the problems and situations. At the Khayal level, we were trying to sift our psyche from what accrues to it. At the Mithal level, we are downplaying the thoughts aroused by events and highlighting thoughts that emerge from within.
In the physical world, you are here and everything is without you; you are contained in space. In the dream world, all you see is contained within you.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
To achieve this, we need to learn to turn within. This is not easy if we start by trying to turn our thinking within -- ya Batin (the non or not yet manifest). Therefore, there is a transitional step: shifting our identity from body consciousness to identifying with our subtle body -- ya Latif. (Page 82) 
This space of three dimensions is reflected in the space that is in the inner dimension--what exists in the inner dimension is also reflected in three dimensional space 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out that by turning within, we are orienting the beam of consciousness in the opposite direction to its usual orientation. As we do this, we touch upon the seed of that plant that we may thus envision as our body. In another analogy, it is the template of the configuration of our body cells, organs and their functions. 
He can to the same extent, find and enjoy even in the seed, the fragrance and beauty of the flower.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Mithal

If we modulate our consciousness to the imaginative (or ideational) perspective (Mithal):

Our consciousness is not receptive, (or perceptive), but configures ideas into images in our psyche.

We discover potentialities dormant in our psyche.

We identify with a dynamic self-generating self-image.

We participate volitionally in the unfurling of these potentialities as our idiosyncrasies. 

Our imaginative faculty represents to itself the elusive forms of our subtle body.

This is our personal participation in the recurrent creativity of reality at the existential level.
So what the soul shows itself is precisely its own image, since the earth is a being, it reflects the image premeditated by the soul.
Corbin
Clues to Our Potentials Lying in Wait

The same applies to our personality. Sufis look to evanescent thoughts that surface impromptu as we turn within. We downplay the impression from without for clues to our potentials lying in wait--the seeds that flower as the plant of our personality. Here lie our potentials. It is out of that seed that the root came, and the seedling came, and so it became a plant. Then the seed disappeared, but after the coming of the leaves and branches and the flowers it appeared again. We can try to conceive it by comparing it with a seed, which is the source of the flower, the leaves, the stem, the branches, and the fragrance, while if we take the seed alone we do not see all those in the seed; yet they were there all the time.
 (Page 83) 
Holding our breath, we are suspending our sense of becoming. Consequently, we are creating conditions that are favorable to calling a halt to the sequence of events proceeding from cause to effect so as to enlist the emergence of a dispensation not previously determined, spontaneous, new, creative. These are conditions that are favorable to the emergence of our potentials, which would otherwise only exist as possibilities.
The engendering of possibilities in the existential world. 
Ibn' Arabi
At this stage in meditation, we are highlighting our spontaneous, emergent thoughts and downplaying those accruing from outside, ya Batin--ya Khabir (awareness). They are sparked ex nihilo (out of nothing)--ya Muqaddem, rather than being causated--ya Mubdi, therefore evidence freedom from conditioning which makes for personal free will incentive. Although we are endowed with nature's ability to self-organize, the latent potentialities are aroused by our will, turning our attention towards them. It is like spotting something that is sprouting subliminally. 

God is Hidden within His creation. 

To 'find God'--ya Wajid, we need to create conditions that are favorable to His/Her appearing--ya Zahir. The qualities that we arouse (or have aroused) are the clues.

To understand Sufism, we need to see things from two complementary perspectives: the Divine and the personal, the two poles of each of our beings. Therefore, 'whom we are,' or rather 'whom we are becoming,' is the very clue through which He/She reveals Him/Herself to us. 
God describes Himself to us through ourselves. 
Ibn' Arabi
These clues are not Him, but we could think of the analogy of the shadow. God reveals Himself to the potentialities of His being by projecting His shadow. The shadow does reveal the form in which it is the shadow. These forms are like the elusive and evanescent forms in a mirror, but they reveal reality.
The vision of forms in the intermediate world is embodied spiritual realities.
Ibn' Arabi 
Our imaginary projections when seeking to know God, are clues to discovering the face of God.
Whither you turn, is the Face of God. 
Qur'an, II, 109. (Page 84) 
Hence we imagine our countenance behind our face and particularly envision it as changing, according to our thoughts or emotional attunement. To encourage the emergence and unfurling of these potentials, it is helpful to project them into forms, albeit that they do not have profiles. This is creativity--ya Khaliq, fashioning--ya Mussawwir.

Malakut

If we attune to The Angelic Perspective (Malakut):

We carry our memory back to peri-natal states 

Our sense of identity straddles our identification with our psyche in the process of  becoming intermeshed with our extra-terrestrial self-image.

We loose our sense of location in space.

We are able to envision ourselves as a continuity in change. (We see ourselves as both relatively external and transient.)

We are able to extrapolate in our self-image between the sublime and the defiled features of our nature, in both psyche and aura's configuration.
As man evolves, he ceases to look down on Earth, but looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through its ties of the lower planes.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Memories--Recollection of a Celestial State

Our potentialities represent our heirloom from many levels of reality. If we are stuck in our human self-image, we fail to enlist all these resources and only avail ourselves of a few that match our commonplace self-image. To achieve this, at first, it seems we need to recall a large area of our memory that is stored in the deep memories of our unconscious (or is it our super-consciousness). 
Subtle memory: memory of gist of experience.
Geshce Gyatu, The Clear Light of Bliss. 
This memory is sparked in that sudden flash of dj vu. When looking into the luminous eyes of a baby, we recollect a memory of a celestial state, which we ascribe to the past. 
There comes a time in one's evolution when every touch of beauty moves the heart to tears; it is at that time that the Beloved of heaven is brought to Earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
ya Jamil (beauty) -- ya Majid (splendor). (Page 85) 
Another way of a soul's inheriting qualities, which do not belong to its parents and ancestors, is the reflection that a soul has brought with it before it has come to this physical plane.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Vol. 4, p. 276.
ya Warith -- inheritance.

We are dealing with a voyage in super-individual and in some ways pre-samsaric states (anterior to association with a particular samsaric heredity), in which the transcendental causes of every condition in existence are rooted.

Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening

Memory refers to the past, whereas these potentials are still present in what Pir-o-Murshid calls the seed of our being. Knowing that we are a many-tiered being and exist simultaneously on several levels requires a paradigm shift in our thinking. This could be illustrated by a pendulum, whose lower pole is moving in space-time but whose upper pole remains stationary, and there are graduations in the time-frame between transiency and eternity. Therefore, the use of a term coined by Dr Stanislav Grof: peri-natal rather than pre-natal (or pre-eternal, azaliat, a term used by some commentators of Sufi utterances) is more appropriate.

ya Mawjud (existential)--ya Samad (eternal).

To access higher levels of our being, we need to realize we are caught in a perspective (as for example under the effect of drugs), and that there are other perspectives. 
We live in the world to which we are awakened, and to the world, to which we are not awakened, we are asleep.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Vol. 11, p. 55.
We are also caught in our self-image.
We are clothed in the garb of an angel, of a jinn, or of a human being. When we see ourselves in the garb of a human being, without seeing the other garbs, we believe we are human beings.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Vol. 5, p. 91-92.
This realization will free us to some extent from the impact of the usual perspective upon our consciousness. In contact, it stirs in us a sense of splendor; it is the catalyzing effect of the dj vu that will hoist us into an alternate perspective. 

For both Sufis and Yogis (who call this level Ana Nugata), we cannot hoist ourselves to this sphere by our will (bootstraps), but it is the emotion, aroused by our glorification, our aspiration, that will pull us up from above. (Page 86) 
Our soul is blessed with the expression of the glory of God whenever our lips praise Him.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It is revealed in response to our aspiration for the 'unattainable.'

To know our angel, that is to say, our eternal individuality as it results from the revelation of the Divine being revealing Himself to Himself.
God acquaints them with what corresponds to them in each world by passing with them through the different worldsthen the spiritual traveler leaves behind in each world that part of himself that corresponds to it.
Ibn' Arabi 
We need to turn within before turning upwards. At some point, (as we hold our breath), the process of becoming is interrupted and is intercepted by what we might call a vertical vector of time that moves from transience to eternity and vice versa. 

It is of an absolutely vertical nature, it does not conceive of progressivity. The process of becoming can be bypassed and become meaningless if you lose your notion of yourself as a 'discrete entity.' 

Evola, The Doctrine of Awakening

ya Warith, inheritance--ya Baith, resurrection.

Concept or Experience of God 

Identify with life of life, ya Quddus, instead of a derivative trunk of tree (when falling asleep the appearance of our physical body disappears).

Realization

Awareness and eventually identification with our angelic counterpart will confer upon us the most rewarding sense of identity, upgrading our self-esteem. We are evaluating situations according to the measuring rod of their attunement or pitch, authenticity.
Things of the earth lose their color and taste.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The real witness in you is now "the witness in the heavens."
Shahabuddin Suhrawardhi
We begin to distinguish our countenance at the celestial level, which is fashioned in the fabric of light. Moreover, we will discern affinities that seem to mirror our own being. 
Amongst these forms, you will recognize your own likeness.
Ibn' Arabi (Page 87) 
This countenance will contrast with our effigy at the Mithal level, in that it is fashioned in the fabric of light. It features an immaculate condition prior to the defilement of the existential state. Paradoxically, this immaculate state is there within its defilement (Caruso). In it we discover the quality of innocence. No guile, the child within.
Ibn' Arabi 
The tarnished notion of the self is of that counterpart that has alienated itself from the totality. Our celestial counterpart is initially embryonic and gets reinforced by maintaining its purity while the human being reaches maturity.
The real place where the heavens are made is within man.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Jabbarut

If we refer our consciousness into the perspective of its ground, intelligence (Jabbarut):

We realize that the personal focus of our consciousness acts as a distorting lens. 

We access a mode of cognizance, which is not based on our interpretation of experience.
When consciousness is not conscious of anything, it is resorbed in its ground which is 
intelligence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Man attains insight into meaningfulness from the Divine mind that confers form to material beings. Therefore, to obtain insight into meaningfulness, do not obstruct the gift from above, by excessive attachment to the perceptual reality.
Avicenna (Page 88) 
Lahut

If we attune ourselves to the archetypal (proto-critic, preliminary to experience) perspective (Lahut):

a)  We grasp the archetypes behind their exemplification at the existential level. 

b)  We identify with the impersonal and (relatively) eternal seedbed of our personality.
Imagination causes archetypal notions to descend into perceptible forms.
Ibn' Arabi
Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithl) in the higher world. The forms in the higher world preserve the existence of their likeness in the lower worlds. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each form to its likeness.
Ibn' Arabi

Hahut

If we attune ourselves to The Perspective of Unity (Hahut):

We reach a state transcending the existential perspective. Undifferentiated unity (Ahadiat) together with a sense of omniscience. 

The one who is immersed in the Divine unity is with God in the grasp of His unity, irrespective of the world. In the station of unity, touching upon the unity, one accesses the Supreme knowledge whereby the grasp of the qualities falls away; indeed the qualities cannot add anything to the essence. If the names disappeared the Named One would appear.
Ibn' Arabi 

Tawhid

If we attune ourselves to the Perspective of Meaning, Awakening In Life:

a)  We adopt an overview of existential experience (Tawhid).

b)  We grasp the unity behind multiplicity (Wahdat).

c) We grasp the multiplicity within unity (Wahdaniat).

d) We grasp the intention behind the programming of events.
The purpose of the whole creation is the realization that God gains by discovering His own Perfection through our imperfection. The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man. This object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that art of himself which represents God Himself. At present there exists only in the world a belief in God; God exists in the imagination. It is such a soul which has touched upon Divine perfection that brings to earth a living God who without him would remain on in the heavens. If there is any sign of God to be seen, it is in the God-conscious one.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan




Light and Ecstasy

First Edition, July 1998

The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of retreats and seminars led by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan in March 1997 in Boston, Atlanta, and a the Abode of the Message in New Lebanon, New York; Keeping in Touch numbers 81, 110, and 113; previously published booklets Light Upon Light and Ecstasyof Light, and previous meditation courses. 

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Jyoti Jessica McLachlan and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 

The mystical conception that all life is the Divine light and the whole creation is made of that light, which is the light of God, has its evidence in all forms of creation. In the mountains and rocks there are not necessarily separate and detached rocks. This shows that in the mineral kingdom life evolves collectively. Evolution may show singleness in the vegetable kingdom, and a every tree may be called single, so every leaf, flower, and fruit may be called single. A flower may be called single, trees and plants attached together may be called single, such as reeds and grass. The development is collective, and yet it shows singleness.
Singleness can be noticed among animals and birds, but individuality is found among men. All this shows the nature of the light: that at the source from which the rays of light start they do not start singly, separated from each other; but it is a collective light; at every step forward it separates, until at its end it takes the form of a separate ray.
Light has two tendencies: to open itself, and to withdraw which may be likened to birth and death. Also, it has a tendency to narrow itself and to expand. This is like the first tendency, only in a different direction. The former is in the perpendicular direction and the latter activity takes the horizontal direction; and it is this idea which is symbolized in the cross.
Those tendencies can be seen in every form, in its length and breadth. There is a certain time in life during which youth grows tall; after that limit, growth will spread in another direction. Therefore the soul is that point of the collective light which stands separate and aloof from other points; but the withdrawal of each ray within naturally enables it to merge into that collective light and life. 

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  
 (Page 1) 
Ambassadors of Light

Just think that you are a visitor from the far reaches of the universe who has 	landed on planet Earth. You carry within you the memory of all the spheres, all the levels of reality, wide perspectives, overviews. In fact, you are a citizen of the universe, and not only the physical universe, but all levels of reality. Did your luminous intelligence become a consciousness in order to experience conditions on the planet, perhaps come to leave a mark? Or perhaps you really wanted to get a very deep look at matter, that crystallization of the thinking of the universe, in a concrete way. Having borrowed the fabric of the planet from your parents and ancestors, your memory was interrupted so you could deal with the way the universe was revealing itself to you on the planet and through the social culture. You grew up to adapt yourself to that physical and social environment, and forgot who you are. Then came a time when you felt uneasy, you felt suffocated, you felt you just couldn't accept being so encapsulated in such a very small reach.

You started looking at the stars, and you felt a great affinity with the trees, the butterflies, the sun, the animals, and the birds. Somehow you discovered all that was invested in yourself which you had forgotten. You exulted in a feeling of bewonderment and began a dialogue with yourself. 

How beautiful this is, how mysterious! There must be something so incredible coming through and all I grasp is just the surface of things. I suspect there is something coming through and I get into the consciousness of the trees, the birds and even of the sun and of the stars. I feel a nostalgia, and I feel the consciousness awakening. The whole universe now seems to be a revelation of the Divine secret. I exult in such ecstasy because what I discover is a million times more wonderful than what I'd ever thought. Yes, I can see suffering, but it seems to be the price we pay for all this glory, and I see how it pulls me to my personal self. The wonder that is coming through to my celestial intelligence is so overwhelming that no price is too great to pay.

 The One Being 

Somehow I'm beginning to suspect that it is really One Being. I thought I saw trees, animals, flowers, stars, and the sun, but really I'm beginning to feel, to sense the One Being behind it. 
The wonderful thing is that the soul already knows to some extent that there is something behind the veil, that there is something to be sought for in the higher spheres.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now I'm absolutely shattered in this discovery because then I'm part of this One Being. How can it be? I thought of myself as me, but the evidence of that discovery (Page 2) becomes so overwhelming that I exult in even more glorification. What a privilege to share in the experience of that One Being discovering Him/Her self as me. 

There is everything around me, all those beings. I find that the more I glorify, the more I manifest that Being, and the more uplifted I am beyond my commonplace personal emotions. I can see the luminous intelligence, the intelligence that investigates like x-rays, working through me, awakening me. Suddenly I find this universe I thought I was observing is not only the stupendous manifestation of the unknown secret, but that it is awakening as I awaken. It is awakening to the reality it manifests. I see that awakening in the dance of the atoms and the choreography of the stars and galaxies, in the unfurling of a flower, and in the struggle for self-esteem in those who have been broken by life and are floundering in despair. I see it in myself. It's like listening to the clarion call, "Awake!" 
The fulfillment of this whole creation is to be found in man. And this object is only fulfilled when man has awakened that part of himself which represents the master, that is, God Himself.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now I discover something in me, qualities in me that are trying to awaken, that are clamoring to awaken, and they require my attention. They require my support. It's like the whole universe awakening as me and as you and as them. I meet beings who are much more awake than I am and they tell me to awaken. It is God who is awakening as me; do not think that I am awakening. I need to spend some time withdrawing from the clamor of the world and ponder upon the meaning of myself, the meaning of life, and the meaning of God. 

These seem to be just mental constructs and I've been warned against them. I see they're a trap and so I fend them off. I'm trying to dismiss these random thoughts; they're too incisive, too insidious. Somehow it is my ecstasy that saves me from the inroads of those thoughts and I see they're a part of my conditioning that takes away my freedom. I need to be free from all those things that limit me and my understanding, and my emotion, so that powerful reality behind my being can surface and erupt. It's so powerful. All I have to do is recognize it and it immediately erupts, overwhelming my whole being and shattering all my assumptions. Then I discover the very same power that I assume created me at the moment of my conception, or even my birth, and I see that it is still working. It keeps on rebirthing me anew. It's like the power of the Divine ecstasy that materialized this physical universe. 

 Unconditional Love 

I realize that it is the power of love, in the most unconditional form it could ever assume. The Divine magnanimity is not just desiring to be known, but desiring to confer the same plethora of His/Her treasures to all the fragments of Him/Her self that proliferates out of a sheer act of magnanimity. Even wishing to become better than Him/Herself was the futurity and the springhead behind the (Page 3) live being that He/She is now in the universe. The desire is to be concrete so that which is coming through may be shared. It needs to be concretized into a plethora of forms which He/She displaces, revealing the secret treasure invested in each of the fragments of Him/Herself.

I have the privilege to be one of those fragments, and His/Her love and magnanimity also create that. What is more, He/She wished to invest me and all those fragments of Him/Herself with the gifts of freedom, and with the gifts of knowing and of will. In so doing, His/Her act of love led Him/Her into the hands of those wills that alienate themselves from the global will. 

I see the drama, and the cruelty, the ignorance, the vanity, the greed, the grossness, the vulgarity, and the decadence. Imagine that love should culminate into those excesses with the result that the misuse of that love should culminate in that abuse. I see humans destroying themselves out of despair for having lost contact with the reality of their own being, like a system working within itself out of hatred, despondency. I see the rescue operation of those who share that compassion and in whom the Divine magnanimity has responded by acts of compassion. That's much more important than awakening; it is the ultimate expression of awakening. The issue is not the waking of consciousness; it is the awakening of conscience. That's not the awakening of the mind; it's the awakening of the emotion of the heart. 

I can see God fragmenting Him/Herself, descending from the solitude of peace, out of love for the possibility of me, and of you, and of the stars, and of the atoms. Suddenly I discover myself in my role as a knight, and the chivalry of those who are dedicated to service, rather than seeking awakening and enlightenment for myself. I see that withdrawing from life is the supreme egotism in order to obtain something for oneself. 

Now once more I see that luminous intelligence looking into the heart of matter, into the suffering in matter itself, into the drama, and carrying with it all the impressions of the heavenly spheres as the ultimate medicine against suffering, like angels of mercy. Then I realize it is Divine love that is motivating my desire to be of service, but that those who are in despair need to want to be helped. Somehow they need to feel free to help themselves in a safe situation when all I can give them is my love.
Love in its fullness is an inexpressible power which speaks louder than words; there is nothing man is too weak to do when it gushes forth from his heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The ability of the universe to restore itself, the ability of each atom to provide for itself its own healing, the ability of the psyche to reorganize itself in a way that will elude some of the misgivings that cause disturbance right up into the soul, can only be unleashed by the strength of unconditional love. 
 (Page 4) 
 Spiritual Power 

The work, the investiture of the knight is to protect the victims of the manipulation and greed of humans and counter those who are wreaking suffering upon other beings. Once again I call upon the Divine investiture in my being, the investiture of power, not just insight but in spiritual power. 

That's why the knighthood is an investiture all the way down through the hierarchy of beings who form the spiritual government of the world. When one acts in the name of the governance of the universe, rather than one's own personal incentive, one feels endowed with spiritual power. It's a power that makes miracles happen, makes the most unbelievable things come true. This power makes one's dreams come true and brings heaven on earth. It does not happen without the incentive of those who have dedicated themselves, consecrated themselves to act as emissaries of that governance. Behind it all I feel the One and Only Being, upholding those fragments of Him/Her Self that are stumbling, by trying to build in them the awareness that His/Her perfection is to be found in their imperfection. Each one of us is the fulfillment of the very purpose of that One and Only Being. That One and Only Being becomes perfected within our own imperfection. 

Of course I realize that alienating myself for one instant from that overall quest of the totality knocking at the door of each fragment of itself, the slightest alienation from that supreme power that is working through each and every being, such alienation has an immediate effect of causing suffering to others. When there is an ignorant person in the post of the judge, there is a victim on the scaffold. That ignorance is born out of alienating oneself from not just the wish of the totality but the consciousness of the totality, the emotion and the thinking of the totality. Now I realize it is suffering that acts as the catalyst of awakening, not one's own suffering alone, but the suffering of the victims of ignorance. It beckons upon one to awaken in one's understanding and in one's love; to awaken to the drama before our own eyes. 

Awakening to the drama requires us to see how the cosmic celebration is working its way in that very drama. There is beauty in the forlorn and those who have been broken by life. There's awakening in despair. The yearning for freedom is aroused by different strains of one's own ignorance, one's ignorance of one's own freedom. It's very much like the chick trying to crack the shell of the egg which is constraining it. Some may find freedom. I can see that suffering is due to the constraint upon one's freedom; not just bodily freedom but circumstantial freedom. One yearns for freedom from one's mind, from the compellingness of thoughts that become obsessive, from the passion of emotions that become so overwhelming that one has lost the ability to find peace. One yearns for freedom from one's greed, freedom from one's self-image, from thinking of oneself as an individual instead of honoring the Divine reality in one's being. One yearns for freedom from the despair born of ignorance. (Page 5) 
The soul's unfoldment comes from its power which ends in its breaking through the ties of the lower planes. It is free by nature, and looks for freedom during its captivity. All the holy beings of the world have become so by freeing the soul, its freedom being the only object there is in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 Our Purpose 

Now I see myself descending from the spheres, not just to discover conditions of the planet Earth, not just to awaken, but to play my part in the drama as a knight in warfare. I realize the only weapons that are not counter-productive are the lances of light that dispel the darkness and touch upon a very deep nostalgia. Deep thoughts are buried in people's souls, buried under numberless veils, but there is a nostalgia for light. Misdeeds can only take place in the darkness. As soon as the light emerges, those with darkest intent try to seek shelter and hide from the advancing power of light. 

I realize that part of my awakening and understanding and fulfilling my task requires of me to awaken the light, even in my very body, and become luminous, because that's the weapon that dispels the bad intent and abuse. 

There is a new ecstasy coming now, ecstasy not just in discovering the marvel of the universe, but discovering the light of my own being. I am awakening it by discovering it. I am also discovering the light in the beings of other people. By communing with that light we reinforce each others' light in mutual recognition. I now see that the physical world is actually an outburst of light. By alienating myself from the source, my light has been dimmed or covered. I see that the light of intelligence I easily lost sight of is not only awakening the light of my body, and your body, but is the very light of our bodies. That light of intelligence is right down in the atoms, and is the very power that moves the atoms and the cells in our bodies. 

Now I see the universe as a great festival of light that, as it advances, dispels the darkness. I want to be part of that advance of light. That's why we are here, so that we may together participate in that advance of the dawning of the light of the universe. This is the crusade of light. (Page 6) 

Being a Being of Light

When we initiate someone into the Sufi Order, we say, "That you may find the path that leads you towards the purpose of your life, illumination." Ours is a way of light. The task at hand is to become conscious of being a being of light and to make it real.

I remember one day I was looking for a rishi in a cave above Rishikesh. There was a group of people, and someone said, "Yes, there he is, up there." All I could see was an enormous white light. I looked again and on the top of the hill I thought I saw a light somewhere in space. I noticed there was a man in the middle of this light, and he had a beautiful white aura. It was so beautiful to be in his presence.

We can work with light, just like a potter can work with clay. How wonderful it would be if we were totally luminous and radiant. We would have a wonderful effect upon people around us. As soon as we face a person who has a lot of light in him/her, it brings out our own light. 

While you're having a conversation with a person, you could just be conscious of being a being of light. It does something to you right away. The person to whom you are speaking is also a being of light, and that's what establishes the communication. That means you have to be strong enough to see the light aspect of that person even though it doesn't come through. That person may be very materialistic, manifest hatred and ugly thoughts in what he/she says or thinks, yet you maintain the awareness of the light, the light of the soul.

I'm sure you want to belong to the tribe of people who bring light wherever they go. Our beings are a million times more beautiful, diaphanous, translucent, radiant than they usually appear. Our representation of our body is totally inadequate, and the same thing is true of the starry sky. We think the sky is studded with stars, but in fact it is a whole symphony of light. Every bit of space between the stars is filled with light. There are cosmic rays well beyond the range of our vision. The important thing is that the reality behind what we think of as physical reality is a reality of light at all levels, not just the level that can be measured by scientific instruments, but at the level of the mind, the emotions, and particularly the level of consciousness, intelligence.

 We Are What We See 

Our meditation can start with a vision of the heavens as a world of light from which we derive our bodies, our minds, our intelligence. Just imagine we have descended from a world of light, and behind it the sun of the whole universe, Nur-al-Anwar, the whole hierarchy of beings of light. This world is not just light, but beings of light. Everything is beings: planets, molecules, atoms, electrons, galaxies. There is no such thing as inanimate matter. (Page 7) 
As one evolves, one naturally ceases to look down on earth, but looks up to the heavens. If one seeks the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now we have this vision of worlds of light, a whole hierarchy, and ourselves derived from it, emanating from it, descended from it into the narrow constraint of our self-image. Having lost the sense of our real being, we are like the prisoners chained in the cave of Plato. The people outside would say, "The sky is blue, the grass is green," and they would say, "I don't know what you mean by 'blue,' 'green."' All they could see were shadows. 

We have to break our chains, the chains in our way of thinking. That is the breakthrough which allows the memory of those worlds to come back. It is the moment where you can dance with joy, and say, "Yes, I know what I am now, I am a being of light, I have always been a being of light. How could I have forgotten that is the world I belong to?" 

That light is interfusing this world; it is not just up there. It may be found in the photons of a beer can, in the eyes of a child, sometimes in the eyes of a person who is about to die. It is the memory of worlds of light.

We wish to bring the light into focus, so it may become a reality on the physical plane. That is existentiating, becoming aware of our own aura. I recommend a practice to do when you are walking in nature. Be aware of the light of your being. Maybe you can't see it, but physically it can be ascertained in a laboratory. Be aware of the light emitted from the sparkling cells of your body. Be aware of the light emitted from your hands as you touch the leaf of a tree or a flower, and of the light around your head which is more intense than any other part of the body. Nerve tissue is much more radiant than muscle or bone tissue, so all that accumulation of cells at the top of the head causes a tremendous amount of light. 

Shihabuddin Suhrawadhi says that after their initiation, those who have been invited to the temples of light don robes or mantels of light. Your aura is your initiatic robe. It radiates far and wide and lights up the environment. When you come into a room you are aware of the light of your being that brings sunshine into the room.
Let Thy sun shine in my heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The extraordinary thing is that while the aura appears like a tremendous interplay of rainbows, there is an effigy of light inherent in your aura. The thinking of your soul has sculptured the light of the spheres into a effigy of light. It doesn't have a boundary. It doesn't have the consistency of matter. 

Still, there is a structure that reflects your awareness and your degree of love and dedication and capacity for glorification. Each one is unique and all the faces are (Page 8) His face, as the Qur'an says. The Divine face is trying to come through your face right down into matter, and on the way it is an effigy of light.

Just imagine going through life without knowing your real being, carrying a mask and looking in the mirror and being convinced you are what you see in the mirror. That is the state of most of us. The miracle of life is structuring something that does not have form to start with: pure intelligence, love, nostalgia, dedication, glorification. There are no forms, but somehow the formless manifests in music as a form, or in your being as a form. That is the miracle of life. How is it that your thoughts should be expressed in words? How is it possible that the motion of your vocal cords should communicate thought from person to person? How is the ballerina able to communicate her attunement to the crowds?

That effigy is evanescent, elusive. It changes according to your mood, according to your thoughts, according to your attunement. The core of it is sublime, and then there is a defilement, a deterioration; the colors of the aura become blurred or dark brown, grey or black. If you are aware of the influence of thoughts on the aura then you have wonderful feedback. You can test it and see how an untoward thought will immediately alter the colors of your aura.

The light of awareness can give you power, because it manifests as truth, and truth is the greatest source of power. With this awareness, you can cure yourself. The cells of your body are sparkling, emitting light; they are continually regenerating, being replaced, or replacing themselves. The intensification of the light of the aura will cause your cells to regenerate and proliferate faster. That is healing with light. You can infuse the light of your awareness and direct the light of your aura into the cells of your body, just like casting a flashlight beam in a dark room. It is not totally dark because everything is sparkling, but you give it extra light. That light infuses your body, giving you vitality. 

You can also thrust all the power of that light upon your problems. The light of your being will correct the misassessment of your consciousness. Your consciousness will now be able to grasp what your intelligence is seeing, just like when you have a hunch about something and then corroborate it by using your consciousness.

Remember that light is revealed and reveals. It is not the light that is seen, it is the light that sees. It is not only revealing; it is creative because it unleashes the latencies in all it encounters. It is like an illusion that is dissipated by a light, like a cloudy image you think you see at dawn and then as the light gets stronger that image is dissipated by the clarity of the light that dawns upon it. (Page 9) 

Skyscapes of the Soul

We're trying to introduce a dimension other than the worldly dimension into our perception of the universe and ourselves; that other kingdom of which Christ speaks, which is not 'up there.' We have to discover the sacred in our environment and in ourselves. We can do that by meditating on light. Our path is a path of light, and when children are baptized in the Universal Worship, they are baptized in light. 

Can you imagine how the universe would look in outer space if our consciousness was able to expand and embrace the whole cosmos? It would be the most incredible world of light. If we were to envision ourselves as being made out of the fabric of this universe of light, we would discover another dimension of ourselves than the one we identify in our commonplace self-image.

One way of expanding our consciousness is to imagine the starry sky and clusters of galaxies, and realize the very fabric of our body is the fabric of those galaxies. The fabric of our body originated in the Big Bang as a pure outbreak of radiant light and this light crystallized itself into matter. You can imagine light that has jelled into a crystal, but our bodies are much more elaborate than crystals. They are liquid crystals, transformed by light. From the moment we do that, we reach out in our thoughts into the vastness of space, and realize we are part of this starry universe. We can't be separated from it. 
The soul is light, the mind is light, and the body is light--light of different grades; and it is this relation which connects man with the planets and stars.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The powers of imagination in us are an extension of what the Sufis call the Divine imagination, which is the trigger behind all creativity. We have the ability to extend our representation of the universe far beyond the constraint of the personal vantage point. As we imagine the vastness we realize we are not just expanding our consciousness; we are altering our sense of identity by gleaning awareness of its vastness. Let your imagination have a free hand in representing to yourself the most incredible skyscapes of light, colors, and sparklings; the explosions of light, effulgence, glory, fiery light, clashes of waves of lights sparkling into the effulgence of a rainbow. 

Just let your imagination endow you with the thrill of the ecstasy of light because that is the ultimate victory over our personal pain. From our vantage point there are beings we think we have lost. They have become beings of light, exalting in the spheres of light according to their degree of realization. Even though we feel hampered, defiled and pummeled by the challenge of the social and physical environment, we remain unscathed in our being of light. That's where our  (Page 10) real being is, so this vision of the cosmos of light is going to help us to discover our real being and lift us above the limitations and tribulations of existential conditions on the planet. 

Imagine you're a being of light hurtling into this ocean of light that is the cosmos. You are discovering yourself as a being of light in this world of light and exalting in the ecstasy of light. When you find you are free, you can fly wherever your heart takes you. It is your ecstasy that constitutes your wings taking you aloft. It is your attunement, your nostalgia for the sublime that determines the landscapes and skyscapes of light you discover. They are really mirroring yourself, or you're mirroring them so you discover yourself in them. Pir-o-Murshid says, "In the day condition, the world is outside you. In the dream, the world is inside you." In meditation, there is no more outside or inside. 

Don't be afraid that you're hallucinating into personal imaginings. Your imagination is an expression of the creative imagination of the whole universe funneled down through the personal bias in a constrained fashion. Trust your imagination when it is enlisted by your passion for the sublime, because it is through that ecstasy that the universe organizes itself as you. It's almost as though you create the universe of light as you discover it, or you discover it as you create it. It's beyond the commonplace experience that is demeaning to the spiritual status of our being. 
In the heart of man the whole universe is reflected; and as the whole universe is reflected in it, man may be called the heart of the universe.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
You may discover in the very configurations of this ocean of light the way your attunements and realizations match the forms of the universe. They might actually fashion the forms or fashion themselves into forms in the world of light. For example, you'll notice the difference between the sparklings where a cluster of light fragments itself into sparks. That will corroborate with your sense of your individuality as unique. Then you find the serenity of a peaceful sunset, for example, where all that variety of multiple expressions of reality seems to merge into oneness in the peace of the unification. You might even find a battle happening there; volcanic eruptions and fire gushing forth from the conflicts of opposing forces. You'll see yourself engaged in this battle if willfully you are a knight of light; otherwise you are a victim of violence. 

Now you realize this universe of light reflects the very drama of your own life and the struggle within your own being. To what extent do we dedicate ourselves to those values we hold? We do it to the extent of being prepared to sacrifice our lives. I think of the Russian firemen and atomic engineers who flew over the tremendous outburst at Chrenobyl, knowing it was at the cost of their lives. You'll recognize yourself in that battle, in the outburst of forces as illustrated in the volcanic eruptions and the consequent earthquakes that shatter our dependence upon earthly conditions. 
 (Page 11) 
Next you'll find relatively obedient light beings as well as rebellious light beings. You'll find photons that are in some way allowing themselves to be ordered by the static architectrony of the cosmos, or the architectrony that becomes sclerosed to repetitive conditioning. Then you have the rebellious light beings like the comets that will not accept the constraint because they are endowed with greater energy. 

You'll see them hurtling through space unpredictably. It will make your heart beat faster when you see your need for freedom illustrated in this being of light, as opposed to towing the line and letting yourself grind in the samsaric wheel. There is that repetitiveness of the vicious circle in which we allow ourselves to be inveigled in our lives unless we are moved by the power of the flame of our nostalgia for what Pir-o-Murshid calls the unattainable. 
No tie can bind you if your heart is free.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As you can imagine, these beings of light don't require the dimension of a comet. There are such things as free electrons, for example, that escape from the samsaric wheel of their atom and start hurtling through space at the risk of colliding and losing themselves as an electron and becoming a photon. That's resurrection. It could almost forestall your body being transfigured into light instead of making a difference between matter and light, the fabric of your body and the light of your aura, because there is a continual conversion from the state of solid matter to the state of light.

See those dimensions of your being. Depending upon the attunement of your consciousness, you can shift it one way or the other and discover an infinite number of facets, perspectives upon your being. That is your freedom to be able to shift your perspective instead of allowing your perspective to be forced into focus by the conditioning of your upbringing, your culture, your education; the whole system we are involved in conditions our existence. 

Light liberates us from the emotional gravitational pull of the self-image. We make our self-image based on the concept we have of our bodies as sclerosed matter, which they are not. Remember, light is traveling through space at a speed of 186,000 miles a second. The thought of being a being of light will liberate us from the constraint of being located in a point in space and subjected to gravitational pull, and all those concepts we make of ourselves in our very limited self-image. 

 Luciferian Light 

Then there is a battle between the powers of light in the universe, between the pure light of selflessness and dedication to the highest ideal, and Luciferian light. You can imagine what a tremendous confrontation that is. The degree to which we can radiate pure light is a function of our selflessness. Light becomes Luciferian when we extract it from its source. For example, a battery is a power that has been (Page 12) disconnected from the source of the power, so it's limited. The same is true with Luciferian light. If we lose our sense of our pertinence to the totality, our concept of our own light is then Luciferian. Even our representation of light can be misleading, deceptive, and ultimately counterproductive, as in the case of Lucifer. This acts as a warning to those who want to work with the aura in order to become more radiant, but they think of that radiance as an effulgence of their own person. That would be Luciferian instead of seeing the self in the context of the light of the whole universe, which the Sufis call Divine light.

There are moral issues behind the meditations in light. We need to entertain luminous thoughts and luminous emotions. That means we do not allow our emotions to be tainted in the least by resentment, for example, which is a personal reaction and holds us within our separateness from the totality. That's Luciferian. It also means being so very up front that there is no shadow lurking in the dark in our being. That does mean we are defenseless and as a child. To discover our celestial counterpart we need to discover the child within that is still present within its defilement in our psyche. That's innocence. That means the inability to manipulate or plot or engage in any kind of intrigue, have any kind of agenda. In the eyes of the world, it's at the cost of being naive--actually genuine rather than naive--but defenseless. We cannot count upon extraneous defense; our only defense is the light of the universe coming through our being. 
The souls of all are from one and the same source, but a soul which is unveiled shines out. Love and light come continually from such souls. We need no proof of it, for it is living; all else is dead in comparison. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We started with the representation of light that is based upon our experience of physical light. Now we're talking about a level of light that cannot be limited by matter. There is something in our being quite irrespective of the body that is of the same nature, or resembles what we understand as physical light, and which can be blighted by shadow, just like physical light. Ultimately it will always prevail. Even when there are clouds in the sky, the sun is still there. Just from the point of view of the planet, the light has been veiled. 
The soul covers its own truth with a thousand veils from its own eyes. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
If we want to fulfill that deep nostalgia for light, we need to see what it is in our selves that veils the light of the universe, which is the light of our being. That's the shadow that Jung was talking about. It's the disregard for the spiritual status of other beings, the manipulation of beings, the undermining of beings for power, possession. The light of our being is still there, but it is veiled under a bushel unless we are able to meticulously work with each of those elements that are beclouding the light. It just depends on how important it is to us.  (Page 13) 
There is light within every soul; it only needs the clouds that overshadow it to be broken, for it to beam forth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We find something really paradoxical when we look into the world of light, because when we look at it we are casting a glance upon it. We not only perceive it, we discover the likeness between our own glance projected on the world of light and the world of light. It's the way they match. The witness in us is not different from the object we experience, it's counterpoint when we realize it's all one. We mirror each other and see the similarity, and eventually discover our oneness. 

Think of our glance like headlamps of a car instead of thinking of our eyes as organs of perception. The glance is conditioned by the whole programming of the existential condition so that the retina generally acts as the receptor, a transducer of the light of the environment impinging upon the cells of the brain. We can't see the stars when the sun is in the sky, for example. The impact of the light on the retina impinging from outside is so great that, in comparison with the light the eyes radiate, it's the light of the brain that is cast forward through the optical nerves. 

We can downplay that receptive activity of our glance by our way of thinking. There are several ways of doing it. One is the Hindu way, which is to question the realness of the existential world. 

Another way is to shift our glance. We have the ability to toggle between the all-encompassing setting of consciousness and a personal one. For example, if we read pages of a book, our eyesight is highly focused through the consciousness. Then if we look at a panorama, our eyesight is all-encompassing, and we can toggle between the two. If we're looking at a hologram in which there might be two superimposed pictures, we can toggle our glance from one picture to the other. 

Although our glance is generally conditioned by the impact of the impression of the environment, we still do have the capacity to shift the focus of our glance. Imagine that the physical world as we experience it is just a cross section of a multidimensional universe. If we think that way, we don't say the world is an illusion. We say it's just the way things look at that cross section. We suspect that behind that limited perspective there are other perspectives and there is a whole world of light transpiring through that which appears. 

We can downplay the subjection to the impact of the impression of the environment. When we do that, the light of our brain, threaded down through the optic nerves as our glance, is able to prevail over the light drawn in through the environment. We become like a torch light casting our light on all things. 

Now at this level of the psyche we are able to cast the light of intelligence of the universe upon our problems, instead of judging things the way they appear from our personal assessment. We see our problems in the cosmic context instead of (Page 14) under the personal bias. Then we realize what we thought was our problem is simply our participation in the drama of the universe. That is a way of liberating ourselves from constraint of our commonplace assessment of situations and the self-image that we carry in our psyche throughout our life. We want to be able to make sense of our life in the context of the whole humanity, instead of being caught in a personal trip. We want to reach beyond the narrow self-image which not only distorts our understanding of our life, but also affects our self-esteem. Self-esteem is so important in order to find fulfillment in life. That's where the light of intelligence makes all the difference in our realization of the meaningfulness of our lives and the relevance of ourselves in the universe. 
The soul comes to a stage of realization where the whole of life becomes to him one sublime vision of the immanence of God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We can see a different perspective from the passive attitude of being receptive to the light of the physical world. Remember that as long as we can see the sun, we can't see the stars. I'm talking about the power of the light of our real being. By being aware of our real being as a being of light, it gives such power to our glance that it overcomes, even repels, the photons that are trying to impinge upon our retina by their power. 

Pir-o-Murshid parallels our own light with the light of the sun. He says that the sun, which means any star of course, is really the convergence of the light of the universe as in a vortex. It is radiated from that point which becomes a source of light. We have the ability to converge the light of the universe and radiate it at the physical level. We become that point which becomes a source of light.
What were the great personalities whose light has shown upon millions of people? Examples. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
 (Page 15) 
Transmuting Fire into Light, Anger into Compassion

Light is a particularly important factor in our lives because it acts as a bridge between matter and the ineffable, beyond our perception. At the psychological level, we all know how it feels to be hot under the collar, burning with rage when abused, insulted, repressed, or when we are outraged with righteous indignation at witnessing an injustice or a blatant lie. It seems wise to contend that we condemn an ignominious act, not the person, but how real is it? Surely the action we condemn must reflect something of the person. We can intervene to counter evil like a noble knight, without hatred. That a gesture of compassion can transform the fire of anger into the radiance of our countenance by the generous feeling of love is perhaps the greatest miracle of life. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan told those training for leadership, "We are tested in our love." Being able to love a person who is obnoxious and unkind faces us with an almost unrealistic challenge. How strong is our love? I mean a wholesome, all-embracing, cosmic, unconditional love, not a sentimental love. One can be judgmental while protective. If we try to wean ourselves from our reactive ego, which is our defense system, we will suffer from psychological withdrawal symptoms, unless our love is very strong. 

The phenomenon of light hands us a number of clues which convey realizations that open some escape from the enigma posed to our understanding when we discover that we cannot account for things on the strength of what we perceive. For one thing, light behaves--according to the test devised by scientists in laboratories--either as though it was constituted of particles (photons), or of waves. Particles collide--like what we understand by particles of matter--but waves compose, forming a network (a wave-interference pattern). We imagine that particles occupy a definite location in space at a given moment, and collide if vying for the same space, whereas matter cannot be locatable as a wave. 

Our human behavior follows the same principles. Our psyches can clash in conflict, or cooperate by completing each other. Waves can configure themselves in such a manner that they build up, like a kind of knot, called a solliton; this is called a standing wave. Such is also the case for us humans when, in the course of cooperating, somehow a conflicting situation arises. If we consider our consciousness as a focal point located in space, light seems to radiate from a point located in space: the sun, the stars, a candle, an electric bulb. But when we turn within in our meditation, our consciousness, as it gets inverted, is diffused. Consequently our representation of light has shifted-it is diffused. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls it "the all-pervading light." We find the same in the words of Ibn 'Arabi: 
Light is of two kinds: a light having no rays, and radiant light. If self-disclosure takes place through radiant light, it takes away our inner vision. As for the light that has no rays, it is the light within which self-disclosure takes place without rays. Then its brightness does not go outside of itself and the viewer perceives it with the utmost clarity and lucidity.... 
Ibn 'Arabi (Page 16) 
Physicists never cease to be amazed by the paradoxical way light behaves when they try to track it down in laboratory experiments. They can only ascertain and measure what happens at the instant it interacts with their instruments, but light eschews giving any clues as to its behavior before, after or between the measurements. It seems a misnomer to call light matter, even though it is an electromagnetic phenomenon; because unlike any other form of matter, it does not have mass. It provides us with a useful model of the relationship between reality and actuality--the universe and the cosmos. Reality escapes any efforts on our part to track it down beyond the existential, perceptual world we commonly know. This familiar world looks like the cross section of a multiple, multi-dimensional, and many-tiered universe of which we only know what intersects it. This paradox becomes even more bewildering, because when we stalk it, reality appears as a virtuality that becomes an actuality in the existential condition. 

We are a condition of God. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We are baffled by the unknown, stymied, ever wishing to decipher the secret of the mysterious unknown that affects us in such uncanny ways. 
He takes you from perplexity to perplexity. 
Ibn 'Arabi 
Reflecting upon the wave-like/particle-like antinomy, we ask ourselves whether our known world is not the crystallization of the reality beyond our understanding, just as we imagine waves to have crystallized as particles, or photons having crystallized as electrons to form a crystal. Just stop to ponder the miracle whereby our thoughts or emotions configure the muscles of our face; moreso, how we may fashion the fabric of light of our aura into the countenance that transpires through our face. To stalk reality beyond actuality, we would then have to reverse this process and transmute the electrons of our bodies into photons (as is the case with fireflies in the process of phosphorescence) or transmute the particle-like photons of our aura into wave-like, ineffable light. This would represent an ingratiating prospect for life after life. Perhaps we could already start preparing for this right away, now. It would mean trying to stalk light as far as we can reach beyond its perceptual existential condition. 

Should we attempt this--for example, trying to shift our consciousness into that of a master, saint or prophet, or an angel, or departed loved one--we would reach a point where, the light that escapes our grasp, intangible yet luring us ever further, does not seem to be any different from the light of our intelligence. 
Light is perceived; and through it perception takes place. Were it not for the light that belongs to the souls, there could be no witnessing since witnessing only takes place when two lights come together. 
Ibn 'Arabi (Page 17) 
What would it be like to live bereft of the body? Our advanced meditations "beyond existence," as Buddha coins it, may offer us some clues. Imagine brain-storming creative ideas, while interfacing and interacting with the minds and attunements of other disincarnate beings, and fashioning these ideas into forms without substance--as an architect--or tuning to a bountiful symphony of emotions without translating them into musical notes and rhythms--as a composer--discovering new modes of meaningfulness without manipulating objects, working at the software of the universe, knowing that your programming will, if viable and meaningful, be intuited by those on Earth who will carry them out concretely and practically, then updating them by being receptive to the feedback from the Earth. The feedback of experience upgrades the feed forward of creativity acausally. 

The clues to soar into worlds of celestial light are, first, in overcoming resentment and shifting our notion of light from its physical underpinning to its ineffable dimensions beyond the existential state, and then, rather than identifying ourselves with our aura, identifying ourselves with the light of our intelligence. Then we bring heavenly light to Earth through the glow of our eyes. This is the "Light upon a light" of the Qur'an. 

'The light that can be seen' and 'the light that sees,' according to the Sufis, now seem like two poles of the same reality rather than being separated--like the horns of a dilemma--as they appear to our commonplace thinking. Therefore to stalk the light of those we yearn to reach beyond this limited world--to be inspired--we need to transcend our commonplace thinking and allow our minds to be overwhelmed in what the Sufis call "the consternation of intelligence." Our ordinary thinking sees 'otherness,' whereas our peri-personal thinking sees similarity, likeness, in a process of resonance. Pir-o-Murshid calls it the thinking of the soul, rather than of the mind--the state of bewondering, and moreso, glorification will spark our souls to ecstasy.

We do not have to condemn ourselves if we cannot forgive, but it is the clue to being luminous and radiant. It is our choice. Resentment traps us in our personal dimension, forgiveness will make us free to stalk light beyond its constraint at the existential level. In life after life, if one has not found freedom, one will be stuck in one's thoughts, regurgitating acrimony, and fail to interface and interact creatively with wonderful beings in skyscapes of light and splendor. The message of Christ, "forgive those who offend us," is hard to follow, but it carries a great secret--perhaps the greatest secret--the sublimation of our human nature, like the way infrared light can be transmuted into ultraviolet, passing through the spectrum. Our incandescent aura becomes diaphanous; we have transmuted the fire of truth into the light of love. 
When the unreality of life pushes against my heart, its door opens to the reality. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
 (Page 18) 
Practices Leading to Enlightenment
I emanated upon Thee a force of love so that Thou mayest be fashioned according to my glance. 
Qur'an X, 39
To spark transformation in all the chords of one's being, one needs to be overwhelmed by something beyond, yet overarching one's personal dimension, so stupendous that one finds oneself carried beyond one's commonplace self-image in the far reaches of the splendor of the universe.

The magical spark that can ignite the fire of fervor in our core is the miracle of the phenomenon of light. Light lures us beyond its physical appearance into spheres which we call celestial, and from which we unconsciously believe we have been exiled. Moreso, if we stalk light beyond its physical underpinning, as our human intelligence excels itself, we espy the intelligence of light and grasp in it a clue to our inadequate representation of what we mean by God.

As we know, the guiding principle upon which Sufism is based consists in envisioning ourselves as fragments of the Total Being, which is the universe, traditionally called God--each fragment containing and incorporating the totality holistically--in contrast with the old-fashioned representation of God as "other". On the other hand, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says: 
Manifestation is the self of God, but a self that is limited.... It is in man that divinity can be awakened.... The soul is a condition of God.... The soul of each individual is God, but man has a mind and a body which contains God according to the accommodation.

Compare this with Ibn 'Arabi:
God reveals Himself to the potentialities of His being by projecting His shadow. This shadow is Him and also not Him.

The "Divine genes," however, need to be aroused by awakening awareness. Such awakening calls upon us to shift our vantage point step-by-step from its personal setting into its cosmic dimension, which is in theory co-extensive with the Divine point of view. To upgrade our awareness we find that shifting our notion of light--from light perceived externally, to the light of our own aura, then to more subtle levels of light, eventually touching upon the light of intelligence--triggers off a breakthrough in awakening at a cosmic scale.

Since spirituality means grasping and incorporating a further dimension of our being (which is co-extensive with the universe), it is essential to continually bear (Page 19) in mind that the object of our search is God emerging in (and as) ourselves, and the subject searching is God as the ultimate witness focalized as our consciousness.
Learn O' my friend that the object of the search is God, and that the subject who seeks is a light coming from Him.

These last the words were those of a very wonderful Sufi dervish: Najm ud-Din Kubra, whose whole life was dedicated to unraveling the mystery of light. For the Sufis, reality (the truth: al Haqq) is revealed to us through form, while being limited by this device whereby God reveals Him/Herself to us, hence God as "reality" transpires through the countenance of God-realized beings:
If God can be seen, it is in the God-realized beings.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compare this with the words of another Sufi dervish, 'Ala ud-Daula Semnani, equally dazzled by the sortilege of light.
Through Thine own eyes, I look upon Thy countenance.

Just like Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, Ibn 'Arabi distinguishes light radiating from a source located in space from what he calls "light that has no rays," which Pir-o-Murshid calls 'all-pervading light' (like radio waves, intermeshed and spread everywhere). For Ibn 'Arabi, while perception takes place through sources of light located in space (radiant light), vision takes place through the light within the witness (all-pervading light). For this, the light cast forward by the eyes needs to be stronger than ambient light.
When ambient light is stronger than the light of sight, man perceives it but does not perceive through it.
Ibn 'Arabi

Pir-o-Murshid points out that this insight is achieved by converging the all-pervading light as one turns within, and then focusing that light as a searchlight.
First the all pervading light, second the light when concentrated on one point, and third the light illuminating all that can take its reflection... You are instrumental in making the all-pervading light allowed to manifest... The all-pervading light manifests as such when it finds a capacity where it can be concentrated....
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Turning within, you will find yourself in a transfigured world; you will espy the subtle effigy behind the objects transpiring through their physical appearance. Now notice the affinity between the nature of the fabric of your subtle body and (Page 20) the etheric counterpart of the objects, then the effulgence of your aura (bioluminescence), and the imponderable luster of the auras of the objects thus viewed.
I saw myself through the lights which things carry in their essence, and which are given to them by their realities--not through an extraneous light.
 Ibn 'Arabi
If you identify yourself with your subtle body, then you may discern the beam of your third eye as an extension of your subtle body.

Turn your eyes back into the space within. Then the same eyes that are able to see without are able to see within... In closing the eyes, still the eyes are looking forward. No, they must be turned inward in three centers, in the center between the eyebrows, on the bridge of the nose, and downwards towards the tip of the nose. As the sense of sight is situated in the brain and the sight so charged with the light from within when turned on to the life without see through more deeply. The aura affects the brain and the brain affects the eyes. Thus what the eyes take in affects the brain and the brain affects the aura. Sometimes the third eye sees through the two eyes.
The Sufis have ways of developing the eyes. They show you ways of looking into space that make the eyes capable of seeing what is reflected there. From these the past, the present and the future can be told, and all that surround a person.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Furthermore, Pir-o-Murshid taught his pupils to thrust their light forward through the breath.

The light is thrown forward by the breath.... When one has mastered the breath, then one is capable of drawing all the forces of life. And when they are drawn in, and focused in a center, then illumination comes.... Then you begin to realize that you are like a searchlight wherever you cast your glance.

Breath is then directed through the eyes or radiated from the heart. Inhale, so to speak, through the eyes, and exhale, so to speak, through the eyes.

In the course of this practice, Najm ud-Din Kubra sees two orbs [circles] surrounding his eyes.
 Najm ud-Din Kubra. Sirr al Sayr 57. Cf. Corbin 1071, p. 83

At a certain point,
The Sufi sees beyond the eyes--or without eyes.
 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 21) 
Compare with:

This is love, to fly heavenward,
To rend every instant a hundred veils,
The first moment to renounce life,
The last step to fare without feet...
To look beyond the range of the eyes
Jelaluddin Rumi, 

Nicholson: Diwani Shamsi Tabriz, Selected Poems, Cambridge University Press, 1898.

Light can be cast forth by the breath through the heart. Pir-o-Murshid considers this to be more powerful than that of the eyes.

This power is nothing as compared with the power of the heart.

In a further step, identify yourself with the witness in you--you as the spectator rather than your subtle body or your third eye.

As the eyes cannot see themselves, so it is with the soul--it is sight itself. The moment it closes its eyes, its own light manifests to its own view.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compare with Ibn 'Arabi:
Let your state be similar to that of the dematerialized spirit of the Celestial Assembly.

Yet another dervish in search of illumination:
The source where these lights take place is the spiritual entity of the mystic himself. 
 Najm ud-Din Razi. Cf. Corbin, 1978, p. 110.
It is as though it returns to the root from which it became manifest. So nothing sees Him but He.
Ibn 'Arabi.
The secret skill here consists in identifying with one's soul rather than one's consciousness as the witness, yet considering one's eyes as carrying this light.
In man there is a hidden light which is Divine light. It is by the power of that light that his eyes can see further than the physical eyes can see.
 Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 22) 
Compare with:
Were it not for the light that belongs to the souls, there would be no witnessing, since witnessing only takes place when two lights come together.
Ibn 'Arabi
To perfect the skill leading to enlightenment, envision the light of your soul threaded through the light of your glance:

Hence light becomes included in light.
 Ibn 'Arabi
This could be paralleled with:
Wisdom is born of the meeting of the knowledge of the heavens and the knowledge of the earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Yet, if one overrides one's tendency to ascribe one's glance to one's soul as envisioned as an individual entity, then one awakens into a yet further dimension of the witness.

All things and beings on the surface seem separate from one another, beneath the surface they approach nearer to each other; and in the innermost plane, they all become one. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Then: 
The light of dawn rises on the soul in such a way that that part of the paramount realities emanating from the celestial constellations and their angels who are their souls predominate in it.... Then they are reflected on the bodily habitation.

This quotation is from Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi (maqtul), perhaps the most prominent advocate amongst the Sufis for working with light. He weaved the threads of the original Mazdean tradition (that of the Magi) into the corpus of Sufism.

An intriguing Zoroastrian, Azar Kaivan, was a Sufi initiate stalking the light.
When I passed in rapid flight from material bodies, in every sphere and star, I beheld a spirit. 
Azar Kaivan. Cf. Dabistan, p. 55, N.Y., 1937. (Page 23) 

As one puts this into practice, it becomes clear that the clue to insight into the meaningfulness of experience is found by spotting one's celestial identity.
Perfect realization can only be gained by passing through all the stages between man, the manifestation of God, and God as the only being; knowing and realizing ourselves from the lowest to the highest point of existence and so accomplishing the heavenly journey. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Compare again with Ibn 'Arabi:
God acquaints them with what corresponds to them in each world by passing with them through each world.... The spirit in man is a heavenly subtle organ, the himma. When it is lavished upon him, he is reunited with the heavens. 
You thought that you were the Spectator, the witness (Shahid) of what you experience, but the real witness in you is your angelic counterpart--the witness in the heavens. 
Shihab ad-din Suhrawadi. Cf Corbin, 1939.
The practice prescribed by Pir-o-Murshid consists in bridging the discontinuity between the physical plane of which we are generally conscious, and the celestial spheres by first toggling between the two intermittently, then eventually by correlating or extrapolating both.

The soul in its manifestation on the earth is not at all disconnected from the higher spheres, it lives on all spheres, though it is generally conscious of only one place.... Only a veil separates us. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
To contact the celestial spheres, it is helpful to turn the eyes upwards.
As man evolves, he ceases to look down on earth; he looks to the heavens. If one wants to seek the heavens, one must change the direction of looking.... Look up first, and when your eyes are once charged with Divine light, then when you cast your glance on the world of facts, you will have a much clearer vision--the vision of reality. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
You will discover that your aura is many-tiered, ranging from infrared to ultraviolet as you shift your attention from one chakra to the next. To trigger this upward thrust, feel the incandescence of your aura, (phosphorescent). Now (Page 24) represent to yourself a flame transmuted as it rises, ascending in your spinal cord envisioned as a chimney.
By closing all the senses one helps that fire to blaze and once the flame has risen, it lights up all the centers within, so all things within and without become clear...And the flame rising from it illuminates the globe--the head.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
As soon as you turn your attention to the source of the light of your being, then it seems to dawn upon you like the morning sun.
Each time a light rises up from you, a light comes down towards you. Light rises towards light and descends upon light--it is light upon light. When the substance of light has grown in you, then it bears an affinity to what is of the same nature in Heaven. Then the substance of the light in heaven which yearns for you is attracted by your light and it descends towards you.
Najm ud-din Kubra. Sirr al-Sayr, 63-64. Cf. Corbin, Shambala 1978, p. 73.
The light of dawn has risen upon my soul and there will be no more sunset. 
Al Hallaj
As Suhrawardhi announces, it will affect the "body habitation."
The seer's own soul becomes a torch in his hand. It is his own light that illuminates his path. It is just like directing a searchlight into dark corners which one could not see before. It is like throwing light upon problems that one did not understand before, like seeing through people, like with x-rays when they were a riddle before. He sees the cause behind the effect. He who looks at this marvel begins to see the divine evidence in every face as a person can see the painter in his painting.... The glance of the seer opens, unlocks and unfolds all things.... As it falls upon a thing, it makes that thing as it wants to make it. This is not actual creating but it is awakening that particular quality which was asleep. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This cannot happen until I become a light. As long as I am not a light, I cannot perceive anything of this knowledge. 
Ibn 'Arabi
 (Page 25) 
Illuminating the Body

As our understanding advances in the course of evolution, we're beginning to value more and more the miracle of our bodies. The ancients used to think the body is dust that returns to the Earth as dust. Now we look at the cells in electron microscopes and measure their bioluminescence. We discover the miracle of life right there in the living cell, and we also discover the impact of our realization upon our bodies and the impact of our bodies on our realization.
The soul is happy by nature; the soul is happiness itself. It becomes unhappy when something is the matter with its vehicle, its instrument, its tool through which it experiences life. Care of the body, therefore, is the first and the most important principle of religion.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
When I was living in the caves in the Himalayas, we used to sit and meditate in the night looking at the stars, then close our eyes and reach right out into the starry universe, seeing our bodies as part of the galaxies. We used to sit in the early morning before dawn and pick up the very strange kind of light before the sun rises above the horizon. There is a lot of ultraviolet in that light. We used to look into the sun sometimes for hours. Unless you have practiced this, you could burn the retinas in your eyes within a few seconds. Here we were looking in the sun for hours. I expect Plotinus would have done these practices, because he said, "To look into the sun, I have to have eyes like the sun." 

The secret was to discover the light in our own body, and now of course we know we're not just speaking metaphorically. Let's look at it this way. Imagine that originally our bodies were part of the Big Bang, an incredible explosion of light. In the course of time those photons crystallized and became like crystals. They became electrons and photons and so on. There is a continual conversion of photons into electrons and the opposite, and after death, the electrons continue to live. Our ideas about death are nonsensical. We continue to live as a being of light.

Maybe you have memories of having existed as a being of light. If you draw your consciousness right back, or if you are able to retrieve a deep memory in the unconscious, then all of a sudden you remember being a being of light. This can change your life altogether. You know of course there are people who come in the room and bring a lot of light, and there are those who bring dark clouds. I'm sure you like those who bring a lot of light. How does one do it? 

Perhaps the miracle of life is mind over body as we're discovering more and more, which of course insures the impact of the universe upon each fragment of itself. The thinking of the Universe impacts upon our bodies and the thinking of our bodies impact the universe. Now physicists are beginning to ask questions (Page 26) that we wouldn't have dared to ask before, like in the split light experiment; how does the photon know that it should go to the left slit instead of the right one? We're assuming there is consciousness in the very photon itself. 

You could think of your body as an ant nest. It's all one, but at the same time each ant has its own particularity. The cells of your body are stationary, but they also regenerate and move in their own way. Maybe some cells are more intelligent than others. We already mentioned the brain. What do the cells of the brain know about our thinking? These are thoughts that will help us to enlist the impact of our intelligence upon our body. The consequence is that it will awaken faculties in our body which we have not been using so far.
If you are not able to control your thought you cannot hold it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
One of the ways of doing it is to cut out the impact of the environment such as it appears. That means if we have our eyes open and our ears are listening, then what we experience is a very small sliver of the universe. You know there are trees around you, and insects. It's very little in comparison with the universe, and also it is the way it appears to us. 

The impact of these impressions on our perception is so strong that we find it difficult to espy the reality of the universe in all its magnificence. If we place a sentinel at the doors of perception, we will tend to turn within. There is always a danger that we will let ourselves be encapsulated in our thoughts. If we don't know how to meditate, then that's what is going to happen, so we're enclosed, limited in our very perfunctory, commonplace way of thinking. 

What I am suggesting is that when you do the Sufi practice Shaghal, instead of turning within, you reach out into the starry sky from inside. Maybe you will discover a very remarkable phenomena which Pir-o-Murshid drew attention to and all the Sufis along the way, and that is what we see as the stars in the sky seem to be pinpointed. The light of the universe seems to be converged through gravitational forces so the star is really the center of a vortex. The light comes through each star. Think of each star as a separate entity, but it's really like a wave in the sea.

What we experience through our senses as light is only the way light appears at the surface. Consider that light is a reality beyond what we perceive. It's a reality regardless of what we perceive. Then when we reach into the starry sky from inside, we are able to have some sense of what I call the reality of life. Physicists call it the light field, which is a million times more splendid than what we perceive of the stars. When we are working with light, we do not limit our conception, our representation of light to the physical light we perceive with the senses. As Dr. David Bohm says, that's only a sliver of the overall reality of light.

Out of space arose light, and by that light space became illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 27) 
Now inhale, and think of yourself as a star or as the sun that is drawing the light, not just the physical light of the universe, but this subliminal light, into a center. Then as you hold your breath, reach out into the starry sky into the galaxies, but don't imagine the physical light of the stars. What Pir-o-Murshid calls the all-pervading light comes through the stars. You can see that you are of the same nature, that deep down in your being you are a being a light. That's the important thing and this being of light is part of this all-pervading light in the stars. As you exhale, you are converting the all-pervading light into radiant light and radiating that light like the sun. The light of the universe is then converged into a center which becomes a source of light which radiates. To start with it is not radiant; it is all-pervading, diffused. We are like the transducer that is able to transmute all-pervading light into radiant light and this happens through our bodies.

Let's do the Shaghal practice. We only breathe through the right nostril and hold our breath between the inhaling and exhaling. Do only three breaths. Afterward we take away our hands. Place the index fingers on the eyelids. We turn our eyeballs upwards and place our thumbs in our ears, the forth and fifth fingers on our lips and the middle fingers on the nostrils. Keep pressing the left middle finger and release the right one in order to inhale and to exhale.

In the first step we radiate from our heart center which is the center of our aura. In the second step we consciously draw the all-pervading light, subliminal to the physical light, through the retina of our eyes. Imagine as we're breathing in and out, without putting our hands in position, that we are absorbing light through our eyes. 
Light is Thine eye, Beloved, and shade is its pupil.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
This is what the sanyasins were doing in India, drawing the light of the stars through their eyes, threading the light of the sun through their eyes. It seems to pervade every cell of the body. It reaches into the brain, then radiates from the brain down throughout the whole body. As we hold our breath, the light pervades the whole body. 

Then as we exhale, we're aware that a lot of light has been registered in the brain. The nerve cells absorb more light than the bones or the muscles in the body, so there is a tremendous accumulation of light in the brain. As we exhale, imagine threading that light down through the optic nerves, and it's passing through the retina and the cornea and then out into outer space. 

To start with you could open your eyes as you exhale, as long as you are able to maintain your concentration on those two beams of light and not allow your eyes to be conditioned by the environment. If they are conditioned by the environment, then you see the objects. If you maintain your concentration on those two beams, then you'll not see the objects. It will look like a blur.
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Let's do exactly the same practice with the fingers on the senses, and again only three breaths. It doesn't matter if your fingers are on your eyes because the ultraviolet light will pass through your fingers.

Imagine your glance is ultraviolet light. It has an x-ray effect. If you continue working in this way, you'll begin to downplay your perception of the physical world and begin to really live in a world of light. It becomes much more real. The physical world seems to be just the appearance of something much more real, that is a world of light. 

There is a method to be able to grasp what we mean by non-physical light, not the kind of light that we perceive through our senses or that can be detected in a laboratory and measured. It's a practice of Buddha called Kasina. First of all, we must prepare. Imagine your spinal cord is like a chimney, and there is a flame rising in that chimney. If you watch the flame very carefully, you will notice there are different hues corresponding with the colors of light in the spectrum. At the bottom there is red, then a kind of orange, next a kind of golden rather than yellow, then green, sky blue, and violet. Beyond that we don't perceive a color, but there is ultraviolet, and below that there is infrared. 

Represent that flame and imagine those colors. Colors are just frequencies of light; the way we perceive them corresponds with each chakra. The bottom of the spine is red. The second chakra is something like a terra-cotta, the solar plexus is a beautiful madeira orange, like you see sometimes in the sky at sunset. Gold is in the heart center, then green like the green of fresh leaves or petals, a beautiful young green before it gets darker in the throat center. The eyes are blue and the third eye is violet. The crown center is like a diamond with all kinds of sparkling lights of various colors, flashes. 

 The Nature of Light 

Some of you may be able to do that if you can just think that your intelligence is of the nature of light. It's not physical light of course, but it illuminates all things like Aladdin's Lamp. Inhale, and pass in review each chakra. As you hold your breath you make that quantum leap and identify yourself with pure luminous intelligence, and consider your aura as underpinning, scaffolding for this light of intelligence. As you exhale, consider the way that light of intelligence burns very brightly and you become very highly aware. The way it affects your aura is the aura begins to burn more brightly under the impact of the alacrity of the light of intelligence. That is what is meant in the Qur'an by a light in a light. We see very clearly the phenomena of mind over body because the aura is part of the physical body.

Now we're going to do the Kasina practice of Buddha. Suppose you cut out a disc of cardboard and painted it red. When you close your eyes, you see a green reflex. Now you don't have to do that. Just with closed eyes you could imagine a red disc. I would say perhaps the best thing to do would be to imagine it as you exhale. Then as you inhale, somehow you'll pick up a green reflex image. 
 (Page 29) 
The skill of Buddha consisted in capturing the reflex of the reflex. I think it's orange. If you imagine the green disc, the green reflects to be a disc, then you're not getting anywhere. What you have to do as you exhale is keep on thinking of the red disc. Now as you inhale, divide your inhaling into two halves, so at first you grasp the reflex which is green, then in the second half of the inhaling you grasp the reflex of the reflex, which is orange. You could divide your inhaling into four parts so you're reaching from one reflex into the other until you get into violet after the orange. Eventually you get into all those areas of the spectrum that are not visible to the ordinary sight. It will give you a sense of what you might imagine to be non-physical light.
The soul longs for a keen perception. The absence of such fine perception causes depression and confusion, because the inner longing is to see.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Whether it's non-physical or not is not important. The important thing is you're reaching beyond the ordinary perception of light. For one thing, you are injecting your aura with very high frequency light, and eventually perhaps non-physical light. You develop the ability to transmute the infrared energy of your body into the visible light spectrum and then to ultraviolet light. 

Deep sea fish, bats in caves and fireflies are able to burn their body to produce light. We do that also. Our temperature is a feature of the combustion of our body, but the interesting thing is to be able to convert that infrared light into physical light. That's what some of the Yogis do.

Now of course the important thing is to be able to do the opposite, that is to illuminate the physical photons of your body with this very high frequency light and eventually impact the light of intelligence upon the aura. I know that sounds complicated, but if you can just do it, you will find you are becoming more and more radiant at the physical level. The most tangible way of insuring you are being more radiant is the radiance of the eyes. While you're conscious that your heart is like a source of a very intense light like a sun, your aura is an emanation of that intense source of light. While you're being aware of your aura you can still concentrate on your glance. 

There is a psychological factor that comes in. You cannot become illuminated unless you are able to overcome grudges against people, resentment, hatred, jealousy, intolerance. If your emotions are powerful emotions of love, compassion and generous thoughts, that is going to make you radiant.  
When we devote ourselves to the thought of God, all illumination and revelation is ours.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 30) 
One of the practices in the more advanced stages is to consider your aura as a container in which you invite people. You embrace them in the light of your aura, and in so doing, you heal them and transform them. 
I am a tide in the sea of life, bearing towards the shore all who come within my enfoldment. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
This is a Hindu adage in India. The guru is an oyster and his/her disciples are grains of sand that he transforms into pearls. You can do that. Just feel those people whom you know; some you love and some of them you don't like too much. You are embracing them in your aura and they are being transformed within this container. In fact, you can represent to yourself the auras of people and in the same way as your realization is going to transform your own aura, it will also transform the auras of other people, eventually the whole being of another person.

You have to entertain luminous thoughts. The Sufis metaphorically call it the light of truth. This very up front truthfulness is going to affect your thinking and it becomes crystal clear, even sparkling. That means absolutely no ambiguity. Ambiguity is like a kind of compromise, not taking a clear decision, dithering. It's a kind of mental dishonesty. 

One last thing is what the Sufis call the smiling forehead. Illumination is always linked with a kind of smile, the smile of the Buddha, for example. I remember visiting a museum in San Francisco. There was a little statue of a Chinese monk. That monk was absolutely carried away by what I think was an experience of light. It manifested itself as a kind of smile of bliss. Maybe he had a lot of suffering and it peaked into this state of bliss, a kind of heroic overcoming of limitation. 

Just imagine you find yourself in a world of light. Your suffering does tend to pull you down into an individual self-image, but you are able to lift yourself above the tribulations of the earthly conditions that manifest themselves as a kind of prison. 
Since Thy joyful smile has produced a new light in my heart, I see the sun shine everywhere.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
It's overcoming self pity. If you are visiting a patient in a hospital and you tend to commiserate with that patient's suffering, you can't help that patient. If you're too flippant, the patient can't stand it. If you know how to deal with suffering yourself and still find joy, then you can help the patient by the power of the smile. Light flashes through your glance when you smile.

Let's say you are sitting in a room with someone talking. While you are communicating at the mental level by exchanging thoughts, perhaps there is some kind (Page 31) of exchange of emotional attunement between the two of you. You can, at the same time, really commune in light. That is, you are aware of the aura of that person. There is a way of looking at a person where you are not really looking at the features of the face; you're looking at the expression. You're looking at something less tangible, less material than the features of the face or the body. If you are used to working with light, if you have done a lot of retreats with light and are so used to being aware of your aura, working with your aura and making it more radiant, then you will always be conscious of the auras of people. It's a wonderful way of communicating with people. Maybe they don't quite realize that's what you're doing, but it helps them to feel comfortable about themselves. You are honoring them, and you will find that at least some people react spontaneously right away. They don't know what's happening, but their being begins to come through in the light of your aura. 

The art of doing it is closing your eyes and thinking of your glance as being made up of two beams of light. When you open your eyes you know the objects in the room are going to force your eyes into focus, so you lose your concentration. You become passive, receptive, instead of casting the light of your being upon the objects. Now if you have the strength to maintain your concentration on those two beams of light, then of course the world looks like a blur. Everything is intermeshed with everything else. If you continue working with this, and it takes months and months of hard work, you begin to bring your glance a little more into focus. 

Let's say you look at a flower. You're not modulating your glance from looking at one petal then the other; you look at the flower as a whole. Eventually you will see the aura of the flower, and if you don't see it, you'll have some sense of the reality. The perception of the flower is only a signal telling you something about the reality of that flower. It can never be limited to your perception of it. Then you do it with a person. That can be a very dangerous thing. The glance of a person can be very damaging, especially if there is anything sensual in that glance. 

One of the methods used by Pir-o-Murshid is to turn your eyeballs upwards and identify with the light of intelligence. Then open your eyes and turn them forward and represent to yourself the light threaded through the light of your glance, that is the light that reaches out from your brain. That's called a light within a light. It's not the light upon a light but a light within a light. This is not samadhi with closed eyes, it's being awake in life with open eyes. You can see the mind in matter. You can see meaningfulness where the ordinary mind wouldn't see it. 

There was a rishi in India next to the ashram of Shivananda. Everybody went to Shivananda and I went there too. Next to it there was a small ashram and there was a little rishi there. Hardly anybody went there. This rishi was really illuminated but he never spoke. A rishi is always 108 years old, they are never younger or older, so he was 108 years old. He could hardly walk, but he could dance and he was just pure spirit, far beyond the mind. It wasn't just that he didn't speak. If we asked him a question and he spoke, he would think it so ridiculous to try to (Page 32) communicate at the mental level. It just doesn't make sense. All I did was to sit there and look into his eyes. How long can we look into the eyes of a person? At first I thought, "Well what am I supposed to do, look into the eyes of this man?" The next day I came back and looked a little longer and eventually looked into his eyes for hours. I came out transformed by the light that was coming through this being. 

Souls unite at the meeting of a glance.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
That is the miracle of light; his glance was transpersonal, and consequently through his glance he was revealing my real being to me. 

You realize that your self-image is totally inadequate. It just is nothing in comparison to what you are. Realizing it is going to make all the difference. It's going to transform your body and give you energy in later age, and give you joy in the middle of your suffering and give you sight into the guile of people. You see the selfishness of people, their greed, their dishonesty, and somehow you are awake. That's why the Tibetans call it the clear light of bliss; the relationship between bliss and light. You know you can awaken. You can switch on something and all of a sudden you find yourself awake. 
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Discover the Luminous Self

There are images that strike the screen of your consciousness. If you just open yourself to this as you are meditating, and you don't expect it, an image will come to you and you'll wonder what that image is about, because it's totally impromptu. 

You mustn't force yourself or it won't be done. You are listening to what the universe has to say and it is revealing itself to you in the form of pictures. It could be, for example, a landscape that is reminiscent of physical landscapes, but a little more etheric, or it could be what Jung calls a scenario rather than a scene; a situation, like a concentration camp, or a heroic act of someone who dedicates his/her life to saving people; or it could be a hospital scene, a surgeon trying to save a person's life. A lot of scenarios could all of a sudden occur to you impromptu that don't seem to be caused by any previous thought or situation; they just arise spontaneously. It could also be in the form of the face of a person. That happens to a lot of Sufis in their meditation. Somebody appears to them and maybe it's just imagination, but it is really something that's being revealed through a form.
It is Thee, Beloved, whom I see in all names and forms.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 

 Light Forms 

While meditating on light you are thinking of beings who do not have a physical body, but who are auras or beings of light, and those beings have a countenance, although they don't have a face as we have, or a body as we have in the physical world. They are like impressions in the mirror, forms that are just like the clouds; they scatter and then there's yet another form coming through and so on. If you find yourself in this world of light, there are a lot of things happening, but you don't quite realize what's happening or what surrounds them. For example, a baby is surrounded by a lot of forms but doesn't quite grasp these forms until he gets used to them. 

Shihabuddin Suhrawardhi was a very wonderful Iranian Sufi who was executed. He was asked, "Do you think that there can be a prophet after Mohammed?" He said, "Well God is free, if he wants, to bring another prophet." His head was taken off for having said that.

Suhrawardhi described a vision he had. He was meditating on light and said in his vision he was walking and wandering in a landscape of light. There were a lot of forms around, but he couldn't really grasp them. Then just off in the mist, the form of a magnificent face seemed to appear before him. It seemed as though a person was walking towards him while he was walking toward that person and at first he was overwhelmed by the splendor that was coming through. At (Page 34) some point it struck him that the person resembled him and he thought how could that be possible. Finally there was what one calls coincidence, and he realized it was his soul. 

Now that's very important; the encounter with our real self seems to be an encounter where our real self appears to be other than our self until we realize it is our self. This is the discovery of the self through an image which is effervescent and illusive and which we can't quite identify with if we have a bad self-image, and we have to realize our self-image is deceptive. 

 Belief and Faith 

This is where faith comes in. I've been describing experience, since I'm very wary of belief, and there is a difference between belief and faith. Belief is written in the Scriptures or it's something somebody told us, but faith is being able to realize something that does not fit into the understanding of our mind and that means we have to be prepared to accept that our perfunctory logic is not adequate, but is limiting. 

If we study Buddhism we'll find the same thing. We have to overcome logic, otherwise faith won't work. We can't reach those levels of understanding. We have to think in terms of synergistic logic. For example, a thing 'is' and 'is not' at the same time. That's not logical, is it? We find that in Buddhism. They ask, "After people have died, do they continue to exist or not exist?' Buddha says, "They both exist and don't exist." Ibn 'Arabi says, "Know whereby you're God and whereby you're not God," We have to accept contradiction if we want to lift ourself into the higher levels of realization.
There is no scripture in which contradiction does not exist. It is the contradiction which makes the music of the message.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
There is an act of faith. Something in us tells us there is splendor behind the defilement and the ugliness. There's beauty in that person who is obnoxious and there's meaningfulness in what seems incongruous, the most wonderful people die in accidents and the people who can be so destructive to other people continue to live. It doesn't make sense. We know people who work so hard and have been discarded, and people who are no good are in good positions, and so on. In a worldly point of view the whole situation is all wrong. Behind that there's something that touches us very deeply. It's embodied in the words of Pir-o-Murshid who said, "Be not surprised if you find that which you thought was a defeat avers itself to be a victory." That's the strongest statement I've ever heard. It explains the whole meaning of Christ because from a worldly point of view it was a defeat. Everybody abandoned Him; He was let down and He said, "Why hast Thou abandoned me?" as though God Himself had abandoned Him. From the worldly point of view it was a defeat and that defeat averred itself to be the greatest victory the world has ever known. By that He wanted to prove to people (Page 35) that if they are floundering in their lives, if they're broken in their lives, they need to be of good cheer. 

You know those words, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." They were badly translated. If you get back to the original Jewish Bible it says, "Those of you who are floundering in life, who are broken in life, be of good cheer." Give hope to the broken hearted. That's a message of Christianity. That's very important for us to know because from our point of view we think we have failed and there's that sense of "I'm a failure." We must listen to what Christ said, "Be of good cheer," and think of ourself that way. 
Joy and sorrow are each part of the other. If it were not for joy, sorrow would not exist; and if it were not for sorrow, joy would not be experienced.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now we move upwards in what is called the transcendental dimension. We are enriching ourselves by the environment, then we turn within to enrich ourselves by what is coming through from inside, what is emerging, surfacing. In order to capture what is emerging we have to translate it into a form or otherwise we lose it. We have to get it, we know it's a tangible form, but now to be really creative we have to incorporate all the levels of our being. 

What I mean by moving upwards is that we are beginning to discover levels of our being beyond the existential level, the level of existence. The Sufis call the first level we encounter the celestial level. When I look into the eyes of a baby, sometimes I'm so very deeply shattered by the beauty that comes through, the light that shines through the eyes of a baby. The reason it shatters me is that it reminds me of something I thought I had forgotten: the heavenly spheres. I think, "What a pity that child goes to school and all that light is rubbed out. Children laugh at other children at school and they think they're naive, so they lose their faith in their real self." I see people growing up and deteriorating instead of progressing and I think, "What a pity. They were so lovely when they were children." 

What is it then, that is so significant about the celestial nature? First of all, it is immaculate. That's the reason for the immaculate condition of the Virgin Mary. There is no guile, no artifice, no role playing. It's absolutely authentic, genuine, and the secret is innocence. We lose our innocence by having to fight in life to protect ourselves and we lose touch with it. Then we lose our self-esteem because there are aspects of ourselves we don't like that we had to develop in the battle. We think we have been defiled and what we need to know is that, for example, the voice of Caruso can be retrieved in its distortion although it was distorted by the bad recordings of the time. 

How is it possible? Due to new technology we're able to recover the voice as it was out of its distortion. That means the voice is still present in its distortion, just like the immaculate spirit of our being is present within its defilement. Our (Page 36) thinking is simplistic if we think we are defiled because of our guilt or whatever it is we don't like in ourselves. Remember that our true self is absolutely immaculate within its defilement. That's what we find when we turn within. Our true self is the child within us. 
As a child learning to walk falls a thousand times before he can stand, and after that falls again and again until at last he can walk, so are we as little children before God.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The child within us has matured and in the course of maturing there is defilement and also there is enrichment and wisdom. The child hasn't got that wisdom, but we exist on several levels at the same time and are able to reconcile all these different aspects of our being. The child within will protect us against our denigration of our self. 

If we're doing meditation with light, generally we assume that light is physical. In fact, for physicists light is matter, but there are several levels of light. We can use a simile, an illustration which is helpful. Imagine that we could get into the consciousness of a worm, instead of that of an eagle, for example. Does the worm understand three dimensions? Perhaps it knows it's advancing and then perhaps it has a sense of gravity so it knows it's going up hill or down hill, but is it able to extrapolate between three dimensions? Maybe not, and in that case its world is like a sheet of paper, a two-dimensional world. Human beings are able to extrapolate between three dimensions so we live in a three-dimensional world. Anything that happens outside that sheet of paper is unknown to the worm, but inasmuch as it intercepts that sheet of paper it is part of its world. 

We are living in a three-dimensional world, but actually the world is multi-dimensional and all that we're experiencing is a cross section of that reality. What we call light is only a cross section of the reality of light that is far beyond the limitation of the three-dimensional world. We're convinced it is light, but there are other dimensions of light. 
Thou changest thy place, but not thyself, O Light.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
In our meditations with light our consciousness is able to grasp or anticipate higher levels of light and this is important. We're moving further and further towards awakening. The Sufis distinguish between the light one sees and the light that sees. If we work with physical light we are working with the light one sees. When we are working with our glance, we think of the beams of light of our glance as light one can see, like the beams of the light of a car. Then if we think of our intelligence as light instead of just our glance, that will open up a whole new dimension of our being.

We enrich ourselves by imbibing the environment and digesting it. Then we enrich ourselves also by calling forth the potentialities that are lying latent within  (Page 37) our being. There's a third factor that is a little more difficult to experience because it's very special and difficult to access. We have to get ourself in a kind of frame of mind for it. We can't pull ourself up to the highest spheres with our bootstraps. We have to be hauled up from above instead of pushing ourself up from underneath. 

There's a kind of element in us that at first we think is other than us, which seems to quicken us. That's why the Christian monks described it as the quickening of the Holy Spirit. Thinking of the Holy Spirit is thinking of the holiest, because we think it is something other than ourself that quickens us, and actually it is the pinnacle of our being because we can't make a separation between humanity and God. That's Sufism. We can't. That's duality and Sufism is La ilaha illa'llah, it's all one. 

There are two poles of our being, but this doesn't mean two sections of our being. For example, if we were to break a magnet in several fragments, each fragment would have a north pole and a south pole, all positive and negative, so we can't separate it. Even as we fraction the totality, every part of the totality functions like the whole totality--not as well, but like the totality. That's the holistic paradigm. 

 In the World but Not of the World 

To get into that frame of mind you would have to think of yourself as a visitor on planet Earth. You would have to think that you don't really belong to planet Earth, but somehow you are visiting, like a tourist. You are not just a tourist because you really are participating in transforming the Earth by your presence; you've left a mark on the Earth. Still, you think you don't really belong here. You say to yourself, "There's something in me that is not of the world" and if you don't have that feeling, you can't do it.
A person need not be unworldly in order to become spiritual. We may live in the world and yet not be of the world. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
We know what happened to Saint Francis when his father arraigned him before the magistrate because he was pilfering his father's possessions and giving them to the poor. He called him before the court and said, "I'm your father, you know that everything you have you owe to me, even your clothes." (His father was selling the clothes.) Saint Francis took off his clothes and said, "I have another Father."

It's like saying, "Yes, I realize there are qualities or even defects in me that I could ascribe to my inheritance from my parents, but then there are aspects of me that are not derived from my parents. It's another inheritance." Christ was very clear. He said, "They are in the world but not of the world." You don't have to (Page 38) be an ascetic who is not in the world. You can be in the world but still realize you are not of the world. What does it mean, "of the world?" It's the kind of mentality you see around you: the greed, the selfishness, the unkindness, the cruelty, the jealousy, the intrigues. There comes a time when you get very disheartened by it all. Is that what life is about? You're seeking for what Christ calls another kingdom, and it is that quest for something else that makes for illumination. The word illumination is a very important target for spiritual work. 
Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine Light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Buddha says something which is very pertinent, "This becoming does not lead to the non-become." He makes a distinction between the non-become and the become (meaning that which is becoming, like all that is in the realm of time, of existence, the samsaric wheel). What we want to do is not just to keep on turning in circles. We want to evolve, but now Buddha is bringing something totally different into the picture that's not evolving or mutating. It's bringing a totally different dimension into our lives and that's what the Christians call the descent of the Holy Spirit; it's not our inheritance. That's why in the Catholic Church there's a difference between the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Son is something in us which we feel we are inheriting from not just our parents, but from our Divine ancestry, and then there's that other thing, which has nothing to do with qualities and which is called the Spirit. 

How do we do it? The first thing is to think, "Who am I? What am I doing here? What is all of this? Is this true? Is it real? Am I just caught in a certain perspective? Who am I?" These questions are totally unanswerable and confuse us, so we are rather afraid of asking them. 

Buddha said, "Memory is interrupted at the moment of birth." (Actually, it's conception.) From that time onwards we only remember the things that occurred to us since birth or conception. That's our conscious memory, but we do have an unconscious memory and the unconscious memory can be retrieved if we extend our consciousness beyond the reach of the personal concept of ourself as an 'I'. That's one of the practices Buddhists do, and of course the Sufis do the same thing. The memory of the universe that is consigned within our unconscious, or what Jung calls the collective unconscious, begins to emerge. 

Buddha gave us proof when he said, "There was a time when there was no smoke on the planet." In those days how could he have known there was a time when there were no humans? No smoke means no chimneys, no fire, which means no humans. He knew there was a time when there were no humans on planet Earth. How could he know?

What we're trying to do then, is to recover a memory that is consigned to the unconscious and retrieve it. When I look into the eyes of babies, that memory comes back. 
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I find when I enter a cathedral--when they're playing the B-Minor Mass of Bach--it all comes back to me, like, "Ah, I know this; this is familiar to me," or if I climb the high mountains and look at all the different colors of the clouds at dawn and then I think to myself, "This world is known to me. It's true. That's where I belong." It's a sense of belonging to a level I had forgotten, having descended into an exile as the Sufis call it, and now I wish to recover that memory. 

Certain practices are helpful. The Kasina practice, as described in an earlier chapter, was done by Buddha himself. Remember that you imagine you are looking at a red disk as you inhale and close your eyes, and then see a green disk. Just let that green disk all of a sudden shoot forth in your consciousness and then keep on alternating between the two. Now as you exhale think of the red disk and when you inhale, the green disk, and then continue to inhale. Divide your inhaling in two, and the second part of the inhaling try to grasp the reflex of the reflex, which is orange. You could go one step further and divide your inhaling in three, and try to touch upon the reflex of the reflex of the reflex. 

Now instead of a colored light think of colorless light. Think that you are looking into a bright light, like the head lamps of a car for example, as you exhale, and as you inhale you keep on moving up from one reflex to the other. The Sufis add a further stage and that is after inhaling you hold your breath rather than exhaling again, then exhale. As you hold your breath you make a quantum leap in that you think your intelligence is luminous intelligence. It's not just intelligence. It is a different type of light altogether than anything you imagined light to be. Think about this: consciousness is passive, isn't it? It is picking up information whether it is physical, psychological, or psychic, but intelligence thrusts its light upon things. It is active instead of passive.
It is the soul's light which is natural intelligence.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
You're awakening from the perspective of the world and instead of being a consciousness that is picking up information, you identify with your intelligence. All consciousness can do is to confirm something you already know, and so you are awakening to what you know. It is a kind of inner awareness, an inner knowledge, regardless of experience.
 (Page 40) 
Awakening and Illumination

There is something about light that causes the heart to beat faster and exalts our soul. Actually what we are doing is awakening. The words awakening and illumination are sometimes used alternately and it's important to be very clear about their meaning. The fact is they go together. The more awake one is the more light one radiates in one's glance and in one's aura.

One of the more tangible features of a state of illumination is that one is absolutely radiant. One's presence fills the room with light. 

This goes together with a state of acute awareness on all levels, perspicacity, alacrity, insight, intuition. It also goes together with all the shadows which take away our light, which cause resentment and hatred, dishonesty, lasciviousness, or any kind of psychic uncleanliness. To become more radiant, we need to work at all levels of our being, the physical, thoughts, emotions.

There is a light in every soul; it only needs the clouds that overshadow it to be broken, for it to beam forth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 Levels of Being 

At the physical level, practices of visualizing light enhance the radiation of photons from our bodies. The cells of our body are continually proliferating in the process of mitosis. Every time a cell divides there is a tremendous outbreak of light.

When you look at a flower, a tree or even a blade of grass, it is fluorescing light, not just reflecting the light of the sun. In the same way, our own flesh, the very electrons of the body, are being transmuted into photons. The electrons free themselves from their orbits and begin to dance the dance of Shiva. When they expend all their energy and return to their earlier state, any energy that remains is fluoresced as light. They are continually absorbing light from the sun and then giving out that light in the form of fluorescence. The other thing that is happening is that your body is burning. It is in a state of combustion, giving out infrared rays in the form of heat, but also light of all different frequencies.

The physical visualization will help, but there is a deeper work to do, to clarify the mirror of the soul as the Sufis say. If one isn't totally honest, the thoughts become confused, ambiguous. There is work to do in meditation in order to make the thoughts luminous.
The mind is a world, a world that one makes and in which one will make one's life in the hereafter as a spider lives in the web it has woven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 41) 
The Tibetans work with the colors of the aura to transmute the rather gross energy of infrared light into ultraviolet frequencies. Instead of the colors of the aura being random, as they are most of the time, they start ordering themselves in a sequence rather like a rainbow. Above the head is a whole array where all the colors are repeated again. Of course, it is much more complex than this. There are beautiful colors of light beyond the visible range, frequencies which we don't interpret as colors but which are incredibly beautiful. In this method, as you inhale you are particularly conscious of giving order to the colors of your aura. Then as you hold your breath, let yourself be moved by the symphony of light at all levels, and that includes the ultimate level, the light of intelligence. 

The moment of illumination comes with this awakening, when you see your real being as a light of intelligence that casts its light on all things and makes all things clear. Then you see that all the different bodies of light which have accrued to that pristine core of your being are like a support system, the lamp that protects the light.

When you exhale you might experience the miracle where the intensity of your awareness of your awakening brightens your aura. One could say the light of intelligence enhances the light of the aura. It's just like when you grasp something that you hadn't understood before. Suddenly there is a smile, an outburst of energy, and there is a breakthrough of light. Your whole aura burns all of a sudden with a brighter flame because of the intensity of your awareness, a light upon a light. The light of your awareness (what the early Christian church fathers like Gregory of Nissa called the uncreated light) impacts the created light we understand as photons.

Awakening triggers off illumination. It's good to see the relationship between awakening and illumination, and that would be ya Alim -- ya Nur, or ya Nur -- ya Alim. Awakening is always in some way connected with light. It's not an intellectual thing; it has to do with not only the radiance of your aura but also luminous thoughts. You experience a kind of clarity in your thoughts that overcomes ambiguity because light brings out the edges of things and makes everything clear. 
Our thoughts have prepared us for the happiness or unhappiness we experience. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Your thoughts become crystal clear instead of nebulous. I use the phrase, "entertaining luminous thoughts." I don't even think one can project this picture unless it is motivated and supported by a very beautiful emotion. Need I say just how different it is from dark emotions, resentment, or betraying someone, or hatred, deceiving someone, manipulating someone for one's good, greed and so on? Something of the angelic dimension of your being emerges when called for. When circumstances are favorable these aspects of your being are going to emerge. If you keep on repeating this over a period of time, your personality will be transformed because you bring into your personality elements that otherwise would have been simply buried. You don't have to try to figure out what is  (Page 42) happening with your thoughts. It won't just happen automatically, but it's a nice idea to think of the difference between thoughts when they become crystal clear and when they are nebulous. 

When there is even the slightest inclination to deceive someone, one's thoughts become nebulous, they're not clear. You can clarify thoughts by confronting them with the power of truth. They become crystalline, clearly outlined, not blurred or nebulous. You become a very clear person and your dealings with people and with problems become clear. 
Heaven and hell are manifestations of agreeable and disagreeable thought.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I imagine thoughts being like the sparkling of the aura. You have a certain core in the aura that somewhat has the countenance of your face or your heart. An effervescence seems to sparkle at the jagged ends, which is the way thoughts are translated in the fabric of light of your aura. Sometimes those thoughts are explosive, like fireworks. Other times they are rather dull and repetitive. Your whole aura is involved in a process. It gives you feedback. Sometimes these formations are harmonious and congruent and at other times they are random and almost disruptive. So you have a wonderful feedback system there, but you see that depends on your own sense of aesthetics. In fact, the clue to the celestial spheres is in the nature of one's emotion.

We want to make our emotions luminous. I am not using metaphor when I say that emotions can be luminous. When a person expresses a generous thought, a generous emotion, a generous gesture, the person smiles. When the face smiles, physiologically the body burns more brightly. It fluoresces, emitting more light than ever. One says in science that the cells are in an excited state; the cells of the body experience ecstasy. The ecstasy of the psyche is communicated to one's body. Therefore, one's emotional attunement is a prerequisite for being illuminated.
The light which comes from the soul, rises through the heart and manifests outwardly in one's smile, is indeed the light from heaven.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Unconditional love is a good example of an emotion that is luminous, compared with the dark emotions of hatred, anger and jealousy. All such emotions are represented in Christianity as The Fall. There is no doubt about it; there is a fall. A kind of moral gravity draws us from the sublime into the vulgar. If one wishes to attain a sense of fulfillment in one's life, one needs to overcome that gravitational pull by working with oneself to clarify that whole area which is murky and dusky, and which tends to cloud the clarity of one's soul.

Through emotions you can reach the plane of pure splendor. Begin by imagining something beautiful. It could be a beautiful object, a beautiful gesture, or a  (Page 43) beautiful thought. Music is helpful because there is no form. You've got to make that quantum leap beyond the tangible, and it is the attunement of your emotion that will trigger off that leap. However, there's a limit to visualization. You can only take the next step if you are so caught up in the image of beauty you are shattered to the core of your being, so you don't know whether you are crying or laughing, it is so beautiful. If one is shaken in one's emotion, the heart is affected with its joy and its pain. The door to the emotion of the soul is the emotion of the heart.

The next step is the "ah ha" moment when all of a sudden you grasp the Divine intention, not the programming; the intention is beyond the programming. You grasp beingness. I don't want to say the being of God; that is a projection. You grasp that all is one being. You don't reduce a being to its body; it is the mind, the emotion, the presence, the attunement, the intention. Consciously, that sudden click of intelligence triggers off an outburst of light, a clarity of awakening.
The soul has manifested in the world in order that it may experience the different phases of existence and yet be aware not to lose its way, but regain its freedom in addition to the experience and knowledge it has gained in the world.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
There is a breakthrough of light right down to your aura, light that reaches right into the stars. The stars are beings, not little bits of light in the sky; they are beings of light. While the photons of your aura are bombarding the stars, your being is connecting with the beings of the archangels of the stars. There is communication at all levels. There is light upon light, and life communicating life to life, and the ecstasy of creation, and you are part of that wonder. 

 Modes of Light 

The most important dimension of light is the light of intelligence. There is the light we absorb from the environment; in a sense we ingest light from the universe and emit that light in our aura. There's another mode of light which emerges from within, a new dispensation, the all-pervading light. It's not from without, it's from within. 

There's another quality of light which we have already discussed, and that is non-physical light. When you identify with that type of light you realize that you were a being of light prior to your birth; your aura's not just the light that you've absorbed from the environment. There is an interaction between those different lights, leading you to further levels. There's the level of celestial light, and then there's the light of intelligence.
We're like a star that is able to converge the diffused light of the universe and then beam it out in one direction. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 44) 
Our wazaif do not reflect these different aspects of light. The word is a catalyst, but it's up to you to be clear as to what aspect of light you are aware of or working with at the time. I'm pointing to the importance of the relationship between ya Nur and ya Munawwir. Say your aura is Munawwir. Your aura is the lamp, and Nur is the light of intelligence. The light of intelligence seems to awaken or enhance the light of the lamp. That's the meaning of the phrase in the Qur'an, "a light upon a light." If you say ya Nur -- ya Munawwir, you're aware that your perspicacity affects your aura and makes you more radiant.

We have this wonderful wazifa combination that works with the configuration of your subtle bodies in order for you to have a feedback system. It gives you a sense of yourself; you can see yourself mirrored in that image. That plays a very important part in Sufism. 
Your soul projects its form in an image whereby it gives you a sense of the nature of your soul. 
Ibn 'Arabi
It's a process of reflection that is creativity. Creativity is always translating a thought or an emotion into a form. Even though you know the form is just a means, a clue, it acts as a feedback system. That would be the wonderful combination of ya Munawwir -- ya Musawwir. This is because Musawwir means the sculptor, the fashioner and Munawwir the lamp. The lamp that is your aura is being confectioned in the form that expresses the nature of your soul, so you discover yourself through these projections. Now, it's not a one-to-one situation because one could say one's soul carries an infinitely wider range of bounty than our psyche and so those projections that manifest as images are changing all the time. Some of the techniques used are to imagine landscapes of the soul in which you discover aspects of yourself.

 The Mirroring Effect 

While you're in the first stage of working with the aura you are breathing in and out and so you tend to just think of the aura as a collection of light. While you're fluctuating you might be able to grasp the contours of your aura. It doesn't have a profile but it resembles your face and your body, particularly the arms and shoulders and so on. You could look in the mirror and just think of someone who has done you much harm and you see the expression on your face. Now think to yourself, "I can forgive that person," and see the expression on your face. The mirror is the cheapest feedback system in the world. You see it right away, right there in front of you, there's no doubt about it. You can work with any wazifa, like Haqq, (truth) or Rahim (compassion) and see what happens to your glance, to the expression in your eyes.
When we find faults and see no excuses, we are blind to the Light which can free a person from his faults and give rise to that forgiveness which is the very essence of God, and which is to be found in the human heart.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan (Page 45) 
Once you've done that, turn within to what is called the subtle body. The word we use is Latif. Subtle would be like steam instead of rocks, for example. Two clouds merge whereas rocks will collide. It gives you a very harmonious sense of merging as a being of light with other beings of light and mirroring beings of light and so on. It's a wonderful sense of communing with light. Then you get this extraordinary mirroring effect. You see how people react to your light or your darkness and how you react to the light or the darkness of people. This is as a network of connectiveness, like the roots of the water lilies under the surface of the water, but in terms of light now. You can do exactly what we did previously, but without looking in the physical mirror. One has a kind of sense of the countenance of one's aura and it's a much better feedback system than the physical mirror.

At first this is a feedback system; it gives you a sense of how your thoughts affect the configuration of your aura. Then we come to that point which is a very important breakthrough in meditation. That's what one calls fashioning, or making the states of consciousness corporeal. You can fashion your subtle body. You become like a sculptor who is able to fashion your body of light. Even a sculptor can only do it if his/her hands follow his/her esthetic sense. It has to reflect one's attunement. So that means your state of consciousness in meditation is going to actually configure your subtle body of light. It not only serves as a feedback system but as a means of making one's realization concrete so it becomes reality. That's the meaning of Mawjud.

We come to a very challenging thought; it's quite incredible. You know the Hindu theory of maya. To get to samadhi you have to be unaware of the physical world and even unaware of your thoughts or your personality and gradually you overcome the existential conditioning of which you are, and awaken beyond the beyond. That's Yoga. According to Sufism, the world is not maya, rather it is constituted by signs, devices, clues. From our point of view, let's say on this side of the veil, that's what the physical world is, what all the situations are. From the other side of the veil is how God becomes reality. The device becomes the objective. It's a very surprising about-turn of one's way of thinking. 
He is the knower and also that through which He knows. 
Ibn 'Arabi
You might think, "that through which He knows" is just the instrument, but ultimately, that is the objective because that's how the knowledge becomes configured in its support system. The purpose of a blueprint is the house. If that is so, then you see the importance of participating in translating spiritual experience or attunement into the configuration of one's own body and subtle bodies. The Tibetans carry that out very, very intensely. They concentrate on a statue to such an extent that when they walk in the street they think they are that statue that is walking; they are totally impersonated in that statue. It's like an actor who's able to get so much into the role that he/she becomes that role.
 (Page 46) 
 Attunement 

The Sufis do not concentrate on the form because if you do that the fashioning of your bodies is stereotyped. It is reflecting a statue; it is not really you. What the Sufis are doing is to indeed configure the attunement of a wazifa, but in our own unique way, so each one of us is able to be totally ourselves. The consequence is we do not, for example, sit with a photo of our guru in front of us like in a Hindu ashram, but get into the attunement of a master so we are able to see things in a way we wouldn't have seen otherwise. Somehow we can configure the image of ourselves that was triggered off by getting into the consciousness of the master. In other words, we are able to see how the master sees us and then we configure ourselves according to the form that we have discovered when looking at ourselves through the eyes of the master. That is a very, very powerful method. In fact, that is the method that makes a Murshid.

I remember in my early training in Hyderabad in India sitting at the tomb of the grand Murshid of Murshid, that is the Murshid of the Murshid of Murshid, and I was being led by the grandson of that Murshid. At first I said, "No, my teacher is Murshid, so I don't want to concentrate on you." He said, "Oh no, no, I'm just there to communicate the traditions of the Sufis but you must concentrate on your father." So I just imagined Murshid in front of me when I was repeating the Dhikr. He said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no! That's Tassawari Murshid, that's a picture of Murshid. That is limiting. No. You have to get into the consciousness of Murshid. Imagine that you are Murshid repeating the Dhikr. That makes all the difference."

We can get into the consciousness of a master, saint, or prophet, man or woman, and see things from their point of view. In fact, we can get into the attunement and see ourselves from their point of view. Somehow that attunement is really in resonance with our own attunement, but our own attunement is perhaps latent and theirs is active and so it will awaken that attunement in us just by resonance. When two harps or a harp and a piano are in the same room and they are tuned to the same pitch, the chords of one will resonate with the other.
Unveil Thy face, Beloved, that I may behold Thy glorious vision.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Visualize your real eternal celestial countenance which is hidden behind your physical face. Your physical face is a distortion of that real countenance, the core of your being that is not concerned with adapting itself to the environment. We tend to think of it as more stable and permanent than our personality or even our face that changes. Every person's expression changes according to his/her mood. The effigy, the celestial self or countenance also changes according to our attunement. 

This is a practice I recommend you do when you are working with wazaif. Try and represent to yourself, with your physical face, the total attunement to a particular wazifa. For example, if the wazifa is ya Wali, (mastery), how would you look if you were really in charge of whatever it is you are doing; skiing, hang-gliding, (Page 47) driving a car, conducting an orchestra? Your upper lip stiffens up a little bit and there's kind of a consistency in your expression that bespeaks that quality, that attunement. Now think of a person who is suffering, who's just had an accident or is ill, or a beautiful person who suffers terribly or has just received really bad news, or a child that is distressed. The expression on your face is not going to be the same as when you are in charge and controlling the situation. It will be very different. 

Let's look at it another way. A thought comes into your mind impromptu. You could just stop everything and see how it affects the expression of your face. Watch yourself in the mirror. You would see a very clear picture of how your thought has altered the expression of your face. Once you do that you know how the physical form reflects the attunement and one's realization.

The expression on your face is one thing. There's also the countenance of your aura and the many other levels of our being. In order to be able to identify with that celestial counterpart, you have to give up resorting to reactionary emotions, attitudes, and thoughts. One could say at that level the aura is extremely sensitive. It suffers so much from the grossness of the world. It doesn't get damaged because the core of one's celestial being is immaculate, but it is covered over, distorted. It's really affected by the spillover from the world and one's own emotions. Suffering is there for a sensitive soul. It's like throwing mud on the snow.

Try to sense not just your physical face, but the countenance of your inner self. I find it helpful to imagine that your celestial self, your eternal or real self, whatever it is that you call self, is molded in the fabric of light that it is your aura. You could even start by thinking of the physical aura. One of the features of the aura is that it definitely has a configuration, instead of being just the intensity of a photon count. This internal light has a configuration that matches your attunement and your realization. As you are thinking of a wazifa, like ya Wali for example, you try to feel, really to sense the configuration. It's not the light of that inner light. After all, the inner light is very diffused. Rather, it is the way the inner light takes shape into an outer light, a light that can be seen. You're really fashioning your body of light as a sculptor would do, but on the strength of the attunement of the wazifa rather than in a fanciful way. It's much more solid. There's no end to this. For the Sufis this is your celestial counterpart.
The creation is not only the nature of God, but also His art.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
That image is changing all the time and so you have access to an extraordinarily rich, bountiful pool of resourcefulness. When you come into the battle of life, you are coming from this deep place. Power comes from within. Insight comes from within. Now it's very wonderful to do all three wazifas: ya Nur -- ya Munawwir -- ya Musawwir. You can see all these qualities being awakened by the fact that you are trying to fashion them into images. It's like if you're composing or painting or being creative, you're awakening latencies in your being, making them conscious so that you may apply them in your work of art. 
 (Page 48) 
Communion through Light

Close your eyes and imagine you are looking into the starry sky. You're amazed that your glance is able to reach such distances that could never be reached in a space craft. Your glance is able to encompass a wide space that extends far beyond anything you could ever imagine. The stars are really vortices in which the light-of the light of the cosmos-is converged. Most of those stars you're looking at have ceased to exist many light years ago, so you're looking in the past. The past is present in you, because the light of those stars is now; some of the sparks and photons of that light are now impinging upon your retina. The thought of the miracle of life is really mind-blowing. 

Visualize that your body is made, not just out of the fabric of the planet, but the fabric of the stars. It has taken all these billions of light years for the universe to elaborate you and me. That whole past is present in us, which means we are beings of light even in our body-ness. That light has crystallized itself into what we think is matter. 

Imagine that your body is like a biological crystal. It has the extraordinary faculty of absorbing light from the environment, and being transformed by it. Just imagine your body as a living crystal which is vibrating, transforming, and transmuting continually. See how it reaches an excited state by absorbing light. Enjoy the discovery of light. 

Enjoy first of all, the encounter with light. Imagine you are looking into a bright light, and you are flooded with that light. Instead of trying to shield your eyes, enjoy being blinded by that light. You experience the ecstasy of communion with light. That very encounter with light reveals the light that is not just absorbed by the crystal, but is present in, and radiated from the crystal. You are revealing your light to yourself. Since you are a crystal, then indeed not only do you enjoy the ecstasy of being able to draw in more and more light, but as you hold your breath, the cells of your body vibrate and divide much more intensely than ever before. They begin to sparkle in communication with each other in the language of light, transmitting messages to each other, and exult in the ecstasy of light. We are able to actually heal our body with light by the impact of the power of our representation of light upon the cells of our body. We generate light energy by the power of our thought.
Even the branches swing in ecstasy when they receive Thy message.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Now experience your whole aura. We think of the aura as external to our skin, but it is also very deeply interspersed within the cells of our body, even within the nuclei of the atoms. We are participating in our body-ness in the miracle of light. Being aware of mind over body has an immediate effect upon our body functions, our bodyness. 
 (Page 49) 
Identify with your whole aura, inside and outside your skin. It has a configuration, not a shape with a profile, but it espouses the contours of the body. Imagine the face of your aura, it's the most expressive part of your body. Sense the way the countenance of your face is transfigured by the encounter with light. For example, just imagine you're looking into a very bright light, and somehow that light triggers off memories of having been a being of pure light prior to your incarnation into your body. It's a sense of deja vu. This world of light is there in your memory but you forgot it because you got exiled in the world of the shadows, as the Sufis call it. Somehow, deep in your memory you have the recollection of moving about in the world of light, and being just light, before that light condensed as a physical body. 
Our spirit is the real part of us, the body but its garment. A man would not find peace at the tailor's because his coat comes from there; neither can the spirit obtain true happiness from the earth just because his body belongs to earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
If we just have this 'vision of the heavens,' we can deliver ourselves entirely into this world of light. It's not far away somewhere and we're here, we can move right into it and discover our real being. It is the very feeling of the ecstasy of light that hoists us from one perspective into another, because it's really like a hologram. We experience ourself as a physical body in one perspective, like in a hologram, then we can shift our perspective. It's not that we are hoisting ourselves out of our body as in astral travel, it's just a different perspective. It's the pure delight of light that will lift us. 

The prospect of that delight impending in our soul will help us shift our perspective. We can't shift by our will; it is emotion that will do it for us. It can only happen if light is so important that it surpasses anything else. The reminiscence of the heavenly state is so powerful it will transfigure our aura. We'll find that, indeed, the countenance of the face of our aura seems to flower into great beauty. 
It is the exaltation of the spirit which is productive of all beauty.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Our aura is extremely sensitive to our attunement, our thoughts. The only way to do this is to purge our thoughts from any ugliness whatsoever. We've got to correspond to a very real state of our psyche that has been purified from all those things we don't like anyway. For example, the slightest thought of intolerance about somebody who offended us would immediately blemish the face of our aura, giving it some kind of distortion. The key is in letting our consciousness be raised by our nostalgia for light. At the same time, there's the work that needs to be done to clear anything in our thoughts and in our emotions that might stand in the way. 
 (Page 50) 
Our aura is a customized expression of the light of the cosmos. Now imagine that ocean of light, which becomes known to you through the light of the stars, has fashioned itself into the human shape of the countenance of your aura. Teilhard de Chardin calls it humanized. Instead of just identifying with your aura and trying to espy the features of the countenance of your aura, I beckon upon you to think of it as an expression of the light of the whole cosmos. 
Think of yourself as a condition of God, just like a wave is a condition of the sea.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Don't disconnect your aura from its foundation. Think of your aura as a condition of the light of the universe that is continually changing, recurrently reshaping, and which is very sensitive not only to your thoughts and emotions, but also to the setting of your consciousness. Even though your aura does not have a profile, it is still a zone of light which peters out at the jagged ends, but can increase in its extension. Your aura can become enormous. 

Now turn within, and see that your aura is not just the light of the stars that has been converged, there's an all-pervading light that emerges from within and fans out into your aura. You can't perceive the nature of this emerging light with your senses; you have to really experience it. This is also true with other levels of light, which would give us some clue as to what we mean by our celestial counterpart.

 The Transcendental Dimension 

There are a few skills that will enable us to get some sense of what we mean by these more excellent levels of light, as compared to the all-pervading light. The all-pervading light is the implicate state of light, the light field. Now we're talking about other levels of light, the transcendental dimension. 

We are literally hoisting ourselves into the spheres. The pitfall is our prefiguration of it. Our theories and representation might stand in the way of the actual experience, because it's nothing like what we could ever imagine in our mind, unless we have actually experienced it. Of course it is helpful at an early stage to imagine perfunctorily that we exist on several planes. We might imagine one is higher than the other, but that is a rather simplistic way of looking at things. People are so used to thinking in terms of up and down, because that is the way space appears to us, especially the gravitational pull of the Earth. Here we're talking about levels of reality where space has no meaning. For example, we're meditating and imagining a form, such as the countenance of our aura. It doesn't have a profile, but it still has some kind of configuration, so space does have some meaningfulness. 
Time and space are but the length and breadth of the infinite.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  (Page 51) 
As we reach beyond, we're entertaining thoughts that do not relate in any way to space. It would be misleading to think we are lifting our consciousness. The word 'lifting' has some kind of connotation when we think of space. No, it's something else. Think that it's a hologram in which we can just shift our perspective. We see one picture in the hologram, and then shift our perspective and see another one. That's what we were doing, we're shifting our perspective. 

Somewhere we have to overcome the limitation of our commonplace minds. We think of light as a physical phenomenon. David Bohm said, "It is just a ripple in the ocean of reality." We have to eschew this rather simplistic representation of light if we are to have any sense of what is meant by celestial light, the light of the spheres and the light of intelligence. It is a far cry from what we understand by the physical nature of light. 

Try to get some sense of the different colors of your aura. There's really no such thing as color; there's only frequencies of light that we interpret as colors. Let's say that your aura, even though it has a human configuration, does have some resemblance with a spectrum of light. In the lower layers of your aura the light is red, in the higher it appears as ultraviolet, and in between you have all colors of the spectrum. Generally the frequencies of light in the aura keep on shifting depending upon our attunement, emotions, thoughts, and so on. It's a mixture of colors that is rather chaotic most of the time. When we are very concentrated and attune ourselves to a specific emotion, like peace for example, the colors get much more ordered. By our will we can impose some kind of orderliness upon the frequencies so the aura gets in tune, just like tuning a harpsichord. We can tune our aura too, so the sequence of colors corresponds with the spectrum. 

We have previously covered the principle of fluorescence, absorbing light from the environment and the starry sky. The atoms of the cells of the body have the ability to absorb light, and consequently the electrons start jumping from one orbital to the next, so literally they can free themselves from the constraint of their original state. That is the dance of the atoms that Jelaluddin Rumi refers to, and the dance of Shiva. Some electrons free themselves from their orbitals altogether. It's a cosmic vision that will help us to become aware of the extraordinary phenomenon of light taking place within our own bodies. Then the atoms do not just reflect or refract the light, they emit light. The cells have absorbed light, have been enriched by light, and radiate light. 
When I am absorbed in Thy glorious vision, Beloved, even my tear-drops turn into stars.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There's a different principle which is called phosphorescence, the ability of the body to burn itself to produce light. That's an ability that has been lost by the human being, but it is there and can be awakened. It is the ability to transmute infrared light into light in the physical range, or even ultraviolet light. The secret of doing this is to pass and review each of your chakras and label each chakra with  (Page 52) a certain color. It's like the practice where you imagine a flame rising in a chimney. The colors in a flame correspond with the sequence of colors in the spectrum. 

Imagine the bottom chakra, Muladhara, to be red. Imagine the second chakra, Svadhishthana, to be a vermilion or an ocher color, like the robes of the sanyasins in India. Imagine the solar plexus, Manipura, as a beautiful orange, like you can see in the clouds sometimes at dawn or at sunset. The heart chakra, Anahata chakra, is a beautiful gold like the sun. The throat chakra is emerald green, and the eyes, sky blue. The third eye is violet, or even ultraviolet. The pituitary gland is the center of the whole, fanning out of colorless light, which is scintillating into various hues, and which is called the crown center, Sahasrara. If you imagine those colors, they will have the effect of ordering the frequencies of light in your aura. 


 Jacob's Ladder of Light 

Now, instead of just thinking of each chakra separately, and the color as a band of striated color, think of a flame. There's a gradual shift from one color to the other, although there are certain principles. There are quantum leaps. If we can do it, here again there's ecstasy. We are doing some work with our creative imagination, which hopefully does have a real effect upon our aura--mind over body. It is only effective if we enjoy the ecstasy of discovering the different colors of light, as for example, watching a rainbow. It carries us beyond our earthly consciousness, and even our earthly identity. There seems to be a sequence in even the psychological effect of these different colors. We can look upon the frequencies of the different chakras as the Jacob's ladder of light, which helps hoist our consciousness beyond the earthly spheres. Notice that your whole attunement is very different. The earthly perspective falls out of focus as we move upwards. There's a sense of being able to exist independently of the body, but it depends on what we mean by the body. At a certain point the subtle body acts as a support system as our consciousness shifts into the transcendental dimension. 

Explore this now. It might be difficult to get right back down to the earthly sphere, but that's what we're doing; we're learning how to be able to shift consciousness at will, instead of being caught in a perspective. We are free to shift our perspective, and it's very good that we are able to shift our perspective right down to the Earth plane, and then at command of our will to raise our consciousness above the Earth's sphere. Do it several times, but be careful not to become other-worldly and disconnected with the Earth. 

Just imagine you are your body. If you think you're your body, you are sitting and the world is outside you, and you think you're the subject experiencing the physical world. That's what I call commonplace thinking. 

Now start identifying with your etheric body and its light field, that very subtle magnetic field you can feel. You don't feel it just around your head, shoulders, arms and chest, but also inside your body. It's like the magnetic field of a magnet. If you do that, you are not quite clear about being a subject experiencing an  (Page 53) object, because this field intersperses with the fields of other beings. You don't quite have a clearly defined sense of the subject and the object as two different realities. There's a sense of the intermeshing of consciousness with the object. In fact, David Bohm said that if we start looking deeply into matter, we'll find something which is of the nature of the mind. It's not just an interconnection, but an intermeshing. It's interspersed, interfused like radio waves. We can't think the same way as when we thought we were a body. We are connected with all beings, and they with us. There's a kind of osmosis between other beings and ourselves, and ourselves with other beings. 
The soul of all is one soul, and the truth is one truth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If we examine the nature of our thinking, we will find we do not think in terms of discreet entities with frontiers. Our thoughts are not in categories of reason. In terms of physics, we're not looking at matter as particle-like, but as wave-like. It is a web of interconnections. It is in this state that we can get into the consciousness of another person, because we're all connected in the depth. 

Now, try to feel light. I'm not saying to imagine light or that it has anything to do with our thoughts. We can actually feel our aura of light. It feels very different from the etheric body. Identify with it, and consider your body as a formation within that template that is the etheric body, and the etheric body as a formation within that template which is the aura. The area of light closest to our body is more luminous. The light gets scattered a little bit as it goes further and further away. Our connection with other persons, for example, is much more closely woven than when we identified ourselves with our etheric body. With the etheric body there is a spillover, whereas here there is a real, very deep, very fine woven intermeshing. If we identify with our etheric body, we can find people in our psyche. We begin to think like them or speak like them or they are really present in us. It's not quite the same as when we identify with our aura. Just try it out and see. Photons do not have a mass whereas electrons do. We don't feel the same type of interconnection with other beings as we do when we identify with our aura. 

The first thing, of course is to get a sense of the countenance of the face of our aura. Now think of a person. Instead of thinking of that person as a body located somewhere in space that you'd have to visit, or sensing the kind of power emanating from that person, imagine the countenance of the aura of that person. See that it is another yourself. Each wave is like another aspect of the sea. It's like a condition where there is some kind of affinity with your condition. You know that person by resonance rather than by the I/it relationship. 

Remember that somehow the core of beings is immaculate, even though it is defiled. When we think of another person at the level of the aura, the distortion is more at the surface. When we reach into the essence of that person, then it is pure, germane, authentic. It is a way of getting to know people in the way that we could never know them by judging them in our minds. We can even feel the struggle of the soul of people with the defilement of the world. It's very painful   (Page 54) for the soul to feel the distortion that effects it superficially, but still, it does effect it. This is a strange thought, pain at the light level. We can also sense the joy of people, not just their pain. 
As soon as a person begins to regard the pleasure and displeasure of God in the feelings of every person he meets, he can only be refined, whatever his position in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Walter Chappel photographed flowers with ultraviolet light and you could see this translucent halo of light around the flowers. He wondered if he could photograph them with the light of his aura. He concentrated very intensely on ultraviolet light, on the violet color for example, and he took the photographs. The flowers had an aura! Then he noticed that when he was in a good condition, the aura was beautiful and harmonious, but when he was angry, the aura of the flowers began to have spikes. The auras of the flowers were picking up his attunement. The pictures were a feedback system that enabled him to sense something about himself, like a mirroring phenomenon. That being so, as we lift ourselves to the level of light when we communicate with people; we can sense their auras that look very much like those photographs. 
  (Page 55) 
The Passion for Light

Light meditations are the most inspiring of all practices, and the motivation behind them is a real passion for light. It's in the realm of emotion. One could say there is such a thing as luminous thoughts and luminous emotions, so what we are doing by way of practices must be considered as just a trigger to spark an attunement of one's consciousness. Light could be considered as the ladder that hoists the soul towards its highest ideal. 
Every atom, every being, every star, every galaxy is preparing itself for the state of awakening. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Awakening is like the breakthrough of the clarity of light. Light is not physical; it signifies the emergence of clarity out of ignorance or ambiguity.

Let's begin with the practice of Shaghal. We're targeting three chakras: the bottom of the spine, the solar plexus, which is the counterpart of the heart--they're both part of the same chakra, and then the top of the head. 

As you hold your breath, try to experience the flame we mentioned earlier. As you know, the body is in a state of combustion that's regulated at a consistent temperature. That means the cells of our body emit infrared light. That light can be transmuted to light in the middle range and also to ultraviolet light. Hold your breath and concentrate on this flame in that chimney; focus it in the solar plexus. Think of the different colors that appear in the flame.

For this practice I suggest inhaling through both nostrils. As you take away your fingers, visualize your body as incandescent. When we do this we find ourselves in a transfigured setting of consciousness. That's the reality behind what appears at the surface. The fabric of our body is now our subtle body, not our physical body, although it's within our physical body. It's even the template of the physical body, but it is like gossamer. In a sense it is translucent, and at the same time incandescent. It's like looking at a burning candle. We see the mesh deep down in the candle and we see the light coming through the wax of the candle. The light is diaphanous instead of radiant. 
There are those who are like a lighted candle: they can light other candles, but the other candles must be of wax; if they are of steel, they cannot be lighted.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Time seems to slow down. We are in a state of quiet ambiance. We have distanced ourselves from the rat race so we are generating our own light. We are transmuting matter into light, although light is considered matter. It's a very advanced state of matter where there are particles but no mass. Now if we transit   (Page 56) from one chakra to the next, we discover the spectrum is in our own aura and like the rainbow, except it's reversed. The red is at the bottom and the ultraviolet is at the top until we get to that diamond-like colorless light at the top of the head, which is a scintillation of all different hues that seem to merge in the crown chakra. It has a sparkling effect there, whereas lower down the light is diaphanous. Turn your eyeballs upwards and press your tongue against the roof of your mouth. 

It is helpful to imagine a landscape together with discovering new vistas regarding yourself. Of course you can be creative and inventive, but I would suggest either a sunset or sunrise where the sky is a very brilliant red shifting into rose and eventually orange. We are choosing landscapes that match our own particular way of envisioning ourselves. We are in the landscape or skyscape and we reflect it and it reflects us. This will bring us into a state which is likened to the state of reverie. Our consciousness is offset from the day-to-day focus of consciousness. 

We not only concentrate on the flame, but the whole area around it, the effulgence of the body of light which is the aura. It's like sitting in a room meditating and we feel as though we are illuminating the room, just like a firefly. The consequence is that if we can keep our concentration in everyday life, then we are aware of bringing light where ever we go. That concentration will enhance that particular radiance of our aura because that light is diaphanous and at the top of the head it is sparkling. 

Continue to breathe in through both nostrils and exhale through both nostrils. Be aware of converging the peripheral light into the center of the channel so it burns as a flame. 
The light illuminates the path of those who are distant from it; those who are near are dazzled by it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Another aspect is that when we're inhaling we are like a diode. The current is allowed to pass one way but not the other way. In the old days of wood fires in open fireplaces, we used to place newspaper around the top of the opening to make the opening smaller. The flame would burn much more violently. So you have a sense of protecting that flame by the same kind of thing we've come across all the time, placing a barrier in the way of our senses of perception. That's what we do in Shaghal. Then as we exhale, we remove that newspaper, that barrier, so we can radiate. When we inhale, we think of converging peripheral energy into the center and when we exhale the energy moves from the center to the periphery.

Do you understand why we normally breathe in through the right nostril? Perhaps you know the law of Gauss. If our right hand is a dynamo and it's turning counter-clockwise towards our fingertips, we'll be generating a current in our thumb. It is the electrical relationship between a magnetic field and the current.   (Page 57) We're enhancing the energy that is rising in the center of the spine. Then we reverse as we exhale. Imagine that your hands are reversed and once more the energy is flowing towards your fingers, but this time the current ascends. You could do it either way. You could do it breathing in through the right nostril. Now see the effect if you breathe in through both nostrils. 

The next step is to concentrate on the solar plexus as you inhale. While you hold your breath concentrate on the new dispensation of energy that emerges, as in a white hole. As you exhale, radiate energy from your heart center. Breathe in and out through both nostrils. As you exhale, the light is radiant and seems to move out in concentric circles. It's a much more overt kind of light than the diaphanous light you experienced in the first step. 
Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine Light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now simply inhale through the right nostril and place your fingertips on your eyelids. As you inhale, you are aware of the light that is emerging in your eyes even though you are cutting out most of the frequencies of light. The ultraviolet light can pass through your fingers. Your fingers act as a kind of filter. Focus on drinking light through your eyes. As you hold your breath concentrate on the pituitary gland. Now you could continue to concentrate on the pituitary as you exhale, or exhale and imagine you're casting light through your glance. Then in a more advanced stage, you could concentrate on the pineal gland and cast the light forward through your third eye.

There are some practices you can do with your eyes without putting the index fingers on them. Your eyelids are almost totally closed but not quite. There's just a slit. As you breathe in focus on drawing light in through your eyes, and threading up into your brain. Now close your eyes and hold your breath. As you exhale open your eyes just slightly so you are concentrating the beam of light of your glance much more than usual. Of course, you see you have to reverse the function of your eyes so you don't see things as you normally would when you have them half open. All you see is light.
Wherever I look, I see Thy beloved face, covered under many different veils. The magic power of my ever-seeking eyes lifted the veil from Thy glowing countenance, and Thy smile won my heart a thousand times over. The lustre of Thy piercing glance hath lighted my darkened soul, and lo! now I see the sunshine everywhere.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Imagine you are looking into the sun. Don't actually do that because unless you're very careful you can burn your retina in a few seconds. You can also gaze into a candle but it has a hypnotic effect and you might get into an astral state. Be careful about that. You could just imagine a very beautiful dawn. Imagine the light before the sunrise where there is a lot more ultraviolet in comparison to the middle range frequencies of light.  (Page 58) The skyscapes correspond to these two later practices. The first practice was light emerging from a subliminal level and manifesting at the surface. Then we moved into the very early beginnings of the dawning of light, like I did in the Himalayas. The Earth shields most of the light rays, but the ultraviolet rays are able to pass through the surface of the Earth, so we get a lot of ultraviolet light, drinking it in through the eyes. 

 Seeing without Eyes 

Continue doing Shaghal. Breathe in through the left nostril, but this time concentrate on the light that descends through the fontanel at the top of your skull and impinges upon the brain cells. As you hold your breath you concentrate on the pituitary gland again. Next, really concentrate on the pineal gland as you exhale. That means you are beginning to develop the light that sees through light. When Pir-o-Murshid talks about seeing without eyes, he means seeing a light that passes through the light of the glance of eyes. There is a word in the Psalms of David. I believe it says, "In thy light shall we see light." It's not the light of your glance; that was the first step. It is not the light of the galaxies; it is actually cosmic rays. Instead of imagining you are converging the light of the stars as you did at the beginning, imagine it's cosmic rays that hit your head vertically and have tremendous impact on the cells of the brain. Consequently the light that passes through your eyes, which is already the light which is inside the brain, is enhanced by that further dispensation of light that descends upon you. A number of contemplatives described it as being struck by lightning. 

Once I tested a Pakistani man who claimed he could see without eyes. He was very angry that I would question it. I said, "Well, prove it." It was at a party at the Pakistan Embassy. We blindfolded him and opened a book and he read that book. He was seeing without eyes, so it's not just poetry. Of course that's a whole technique. It is making astral projection. The astral body can see without the body, but I'm not teaching that. The technique I'm talking about does give you that kind of insight because the sharpness of your glance affects your thinking and your consciousness together with that very penetrating light. It's a lot of ultraviolet and therefore it's passing through the surface of things. There is that insight beyond your understanding. That is the act of intelligence rather than consciousness.
Since my soul has caught Thy light, my glance has become a comet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Continue the practice by turning your eyeballs upwards as you inhale. This time you just inhale through both nostrils with your eyelids nearly closed, but not totally closed. The slit is up because now your eyeballs are turned upwards slightly. Rather than imagining the sun, you can imagine the cosmic rays hurtling through space. Now hold your breath and close your eyes. Concentrate on the link between the pituitary and the pineal gland, and on the effect of the pituitary on the pineal. As you exhale, you definitely radiate light from the pineal gland through your forehead. That ultraviolet light passes through the  (Page 59) skull. Open your eyes again, but just slightly. Envision the ultraviolet light of the third eye passing through the beams of light of your glance, the two headlamps that are represented by the glance of your two eyes. That is a light within a light.

You develop sensitivity to different spheres of light. Instead of just thinking at the Malakut level, the celestial level, there are several heavens within it. Hildegard von Bingen referred to this when she said, "I found myself in a world of light, absolutely dazzled. My whole body flooded with the light of that world. Then that world of light seemed to turn into a gate and open up into a further sphere of light even more dazzling and overwhelming. Eventually that world of light opened up into a still further world of light."

The key to illumination is that sudden outburst of the clarity of intelligence that sparks our whole aura into a tremendous outburst of effulgence. That is what is meant in the Qur'an by a light upon a light. You can imagine it's like a penny dropped. All of a sudden, "Aha, I see it!" Suddenly your aura lights up. Perhaps it would be a misnomer to say this is the key to illumination, but it is a pointer to illumination because our body participates in our realization.
  (Page 60) 
The Divine Glance

Suppose you're walking through a lovely forest in a state of ecstasy thinking, "Yes, my eyes are the eyes through which God sees. In fact they are the eyes through which God sees His own body." That is a whole new dimension. Saint Francis was walking in the forest and, instead of just observing the surface of the leaves and the trunks of the trees, he was really getting into the consciousness of the trees. That's a million times more wonderful than just enjoying the environment. That's why he said, "That which you're looking for is looking at you." He saw that the tree was looking at him. 
You thought you were the spectator, but the real spectator is in the heavens.
Shihab ad-din Suhrawadi
God is looking through my eyes. God knows himself through the knowledge I have of him. Does the universe know itself through the knowledge we have of it? It's one in the same. When we think to ourselves, "Oh this is it, this is it!" we'll find ourselves in a wonderful state. God looks, there is only one supreme spectator. 

At a certain point you realize there is a further outlook. If you say, "I am the eyes through which God sees," you're still thinking in terms of duality, God and Me. The ultimate reality is unity, oneness. You're trying to imagine your glance is the Divine glance, but it's not an instrument. 
He is the seer and also that through which he sees. 
Ibn 'Arabi 
Your eyes and your body are the extension of the Divine being. Don't think it is God and you, it's all one. Think to yourself, "My glance is the Divine glance. It has been greatly limited by my perspectives, but it is the Divine glance." Now close your eyes, and for a very short time just open your eyes like a shutter in a camera. Close your eyes again, and imagine your glance is like two headlamps of a car, even though it's the light of your eyes. The Divine glance is the light of intelligence, it's not you being the instrument of the Divine glance. The Divine glance is luminous intelligence. As you turn your head the Divine glance is scanning the horizon. That glance has a penetrating effect, but it's not like clairvoyance, it's the light of intelligence that sees into the souls of beings. 

Let go of the experience of your consciousness. Allow it to become blank. You are luminous intelligence instead of consciousness, and that intelligence is not fragmented. It is the Divine intelligence that's been edited, circumscribed. Now instead of thinking of yourself as the Divine glance, your understanding is the Divine understanding. Your intelligence is isomorphic, of the same nature as the Divine nature. Think as God thinks. 
 (Page 61) 
The thinking of the universe has been monitored by the way matter has evolved to the point of fabricating these wonderful brains. It's the same intelligence which has an inherent knowledge that is not based upon experience. It could be matched by experience. That's Jabbarut. You don't have access to it without having gone through the Malakut, the angelic, celestial level. 
You reach a point at which the witness in you is your celestial being. 
Shihab ad-din Suhrawadi

 Celestial Consciousness 

Now that sounds very beautiful, but how does it apply? There is a consciousness of the body for example. When I go to the dentist, I am aware my pain is my body consciousness. The body is conscious of itself. Cells are conscious. When I have quandaries in my mind, or I am let down by people, or shattered by the encounter with another person, it is the consciousness of my psyche that is affected, not the consciousness of my body. At each level there is a setting of consciousness. It is not the consciousness of my body or the consciousness of my psyche that is active or functioning when I identify with my aura. It is a different kind of consciousness. That's what Suhrawardhi means. At the celestial level it is another kind of consciousness that takes over. 

The real witness in you is the witness in the heavens. That means you're judging things from the point of view of the angel. I'll give you an example of this. I was visiting a rishi in a cave in the Himalayas. It was very dangerous to go through that jungle because of the wild animals. We had to go through mountains and there were monks and sanyasins. Here was this man in samadhi. We disturbed his peace by asking questions. Most rishis don't speak when in samadhi, but he condescended to speak. One man asked a silly question. I could see the rishi descending from samadhi and trying to see how one thinks in human consciousness. It's a totally different way of thinking. 

If you want to reach that point, you have to see how incongruous our human thinking is. If you're convinced it is valid or ultimate, you'll never be able to reach beyond it. That's why people question their thinking. You can see people are caught in their thinking. If you're a psychotherapist, you listen to people speaking and you can see exactly where they are at. They are speaking from what they can see. If you're a good therapist you see something beyond what they see; otherwise you can't help them. We're learning to think differently to our ordinary way of thinking. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls it the reason of reason. 
Ecstasy is born out of the reason of reasons.
Ibn 'Arabi  (Page 62) 
If you are aware of an object, it has already escaped you. You are inhabited by a passion for the unattainable. Your intuition tells you there is something beyond. It can't be the object of your knowledge, or of your experience; it's beyond the existential level. It's like a threshold. When you cross the threshold you are not conscious of the physical world around you; you don't even have a memory of it. You're not conscious of your thoughts, particularly your creative imagination. There's a barrier there and you have to make a quantum leap, passing through a blackout and trusting that you will find yourself on the other side. 

There is no awareness of the physical world because the mirror doesn't show us what's behind it. It's a tremendous achievement not being aware of the physical world any more, or even of our thoughts. I don't even advise it because we need a lot of training to be able to do it without freaking out. You could think, "I can't get back." One says there is a faulty sense of reality, I would say a faulty sense of actuality. It's very difficult to make that quantum leap. You have to put your trust in your intuition and real intuition is not based upon experience. If you see clues in experience, then your intuition is not genuine. For example, someone who has a very clear and tidy mind and lives a very tidy life dresses up as a hobo and visits a seer. The seer says, "You can't fool me." If the seer went by the clues, he/she would think this person was slovenly. So in a simplistic way we say we learn to trust intuition. 

Now be aware of the light in your eyes. It's not just the physical phenomena of the emission of light from the retina. It has to do with an attitude of very powerful Divine love that does not brook either personal power or any kind of psychological resentment, just pure, loving, giving light. It comes from a place of absolute sincerity in contact with the very depth of your soul, and then it manifests through your glance and communicates to other beings. 

 Light Upon Light 

Do the practice of Shaghal. When you turn your eyeballs upwards with your eyelids closed, you could also curl your tongue and press the bottom of your tongue against your palate as you inhale and hold your breath. Exhale, bringing your eyes to their forward position and feel the light you are emitting as the light of the heavens instead of the light that emanates from your own person. The first light came from the depth of the solar plexus and this light comes through the top of your head. 

As you breathe in transfer your attention from the bottom of your spine, passing through each chakra until you reach the top of your head, and image a flame rising in your spine. When you hold your breath, again turn your eyeballs upward and press your tongue against your palate. There you may still be aware of your aura as a support system, but you identify now with being luminous intelligence. When you exhale that luminous intelligence seems to be monitored by your glance. That is a light upon a light.

Your glance is not like an x-ray that sees through matter. It's like the ability to grasp the thinking matter, the intelligence buried in matter. Consequently you  (Page 63) are able to see right into the souls of people with the light of truth. You are aware of the energy of your body. You could even feel the cells of your body as live beings endowed with some relative intelligence, will, drive and also pain, and being able to communicate and reproduce themselves. An effervescence of life is taking place within your body. That enormous breakthrough of energy from the moment of the Big Bang has accumulated in the course of evolution across the galaxies. It is still active and your body is a fantastic support system for your understanding which is buried within that matter, but which tends to emerge. In the Tibetan expression, "the mind rides the wind," the wind is energy and the mind is your understanding, your intelligence, your consciousness. 

The wind can be directed as you wish, so you could direct that energy outward and communicate with life wherever you go. Imagine sitting in nature and the flowers begin to blossom. You have a healing power, you are communicating life. You can shake yourself physically because the energy gets sclerosed and you can activate it by directing the energy up through the whole body, but centered in the spine. Think of that energy as a lift, or as the story of Pegasus, the winged steed that carries your consciousness aloft. When your consciousness is attuned to a high pitch it is as though you covered some distance from the Earth plane. You can get into the consciousness of illuminated beings, angels, and archangels.
Spiritual attainment is attuning oneself to a higher pitch.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
The support system that is your body is an expression of your being, not just a support system you can don and cast aside. It is multi-tiered so it exists at several levels, but all we know is the commonplace physical one. It includes the subtle body and aura. Your subtle body is not just another body; it acts as a template in the formation of your body and as it changes, your body changes. It also represents how your body is transmuted at the first level, so it's exactly like your body. Imagine a force field that has the same kind of configuration, and then consider your aura to be a first stage in the transmutation. There are several auras, one more subtle than the other. These thoughts will act as the rungs of a ladder which will help you shift your consciousness from one level to the other without abandoning your body. It's the other way around. 

As you transmute your body, you are prefiguring resurrection. There's no doubt that resurrection requires letting go of the contingent aspect of your being. A very good illustration of resurrection would be the way flowers are able to transform themselves into perfume; that's how they survive the demise of the support system which is their contingent aspect. At the level of the psyche it means you have to let go of personal spite or anger, covetousness, and envy, which are all mind games. People try to justify themselves when faced with a bad self-image. That self-image is a bad strategy and counterproductive. There is a catharsis throughout, but it doesn't take place by pushing it out; the replenishing of one's being occurs by the power of unconditional love.

I'm talking about loving the people who hurt you, do you harm, or counter you. In the words of Christ, "They don't know what they do." Why do you blame (Page 64) them if they don't know what they do? You just don't blame them anymore. You still love them. You could think, "I'm sorry they feel the need to have these feelings against me. It's like when a little child kicks me, I still love the child." 
Love is a weapon that can break all obstacles on one's path in life.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If you speak about psychological energy instead of physical energy, you will notice it has an extraordinarily uplifting effect. Your soul rises immediately. It seems to be unburdened by the pull of the Earth. You feel as though you are rising with some degree of independence from earthly conditions. You are no longer addicted to the support system and that means shifting from thinking about the circumstances of your life, your problems, or your personality. You can put your psyche into the hands of that wonderful self-organizing power. It will take care of your psyche just like your body programming takes care of your heart beat, your digestive process, and hormonal exchanges.

Be conscious of your aura again. You don't identify with it but you become very conscious of it. You become conscious of the very warm radiation of the heart which is just like the sun. According to the Sufis, the souls of men and women are light and it's the light of intelligence rather than a physical light. Our souls are the fragments of the archangels of the planets, of the sun, of the solar system, and of the galaxies. All are part of the one and only Being who is God, the light of lights that has been fragmenting itself down to that minute fragment of light that is the soul of man. We experience our relationship with the hierarchies of beings of light. Every fragment is continually in touch with the group of which it is a fragment, being the Divine glance. The glance is the luminous intelligence which thrusts its light upon all things.
The light illuminates the path of those who are distant from it; those who are near are dazzled by it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We need to overcome the dichotomy in our minds between the Divine glance and the human glance. Instead of thinking that you are the eyes through which God sees, as in the first stage, think that your glance is the Divine glance that is looking into the universe. It has been mitigated, distorted, darkened, denigrated, but it is the Divine glance, the glance of the king or the queen, that gives light and life to all things. 

We do the next practice from the second stage, "I am the Divine glance." You're conscious of being the extension of the hierarchies of luminous intelligences, the ramification of the Nur al-Anwar, the light of lights. A fragment got itself alienated from its source, and all you have to do is to establish your lines of communication with the origin of your consciousness. 

Instead of just thinking of very abstract lights of intelligence, you could get into the consciousness of the archangels of the planets and stars. You don't just want (Page 65) to get into fantasy. Tune yourself to the sun and all the glory that accompanies a sunrise, and realize that's only the outer manifestation of the being of the sun. That doesn't mean the archangel of the sun has a body or a figure or a countenance like that of a human being. Once you've established your connection with the being of the sun rather than the physical light such as it is experienced from the Earth, you have access to further and further levels and more cosmic beings of light. Remember this principle: it's not good enough just to try to contact that being; you have to experience yourself as that being. Get into the consciousness of that being. You have to become like the sun or bring the being of the sun through. Beyond that, there are still more cosmic beings, each being a fragment of the group which is hierarchically above them. 

 Luminous Intelligence 

Now we pass to the next degree and see the connection between our glance and the light of luminous intelligence that becomes consciousness. We are able to start working with the third eye. Don't work with the third eye if you are projecting your own glance. You can avoid getting into a very personal trip by thinking of the glance of Pir-o-Murshid, a very sacred, Divine glance that looks right into the soul, but is not in any way inquisitive or personal. It's a glance that has become totally purified like you just bathed your glance in heavenly light. When you have connected up your personal glance with its origin, the first thing to do is to work with the eyes.

While thinking of your eyes as headlamps of a car as you inhale, project those beams forward in the dark as you exhale. Concentrate on a beam of light that descends through the crown center like a shaft of light and then is refracted forward as a beam through some point in the forehead at the pineal gland. As you exhale, that beam is aimed at the spotlight created by the convergence of the beams of your two eyes. Now connect up your glance with the whole hierarchy of beings of light and know that your glance is like an extension of the light that sees instead of the light that is seen, the light of the hierarchies of the beings of light, of the pure luminous intelligences. It's important to draw the light from very high up, not just concentrating the horizontal beam of the third eye, but linking it up with the shaft of light that descends. That will give a tremendous intensity and penetration to your glance.
Since my soul has caught Thy light, my glance has become a comet.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Now as you inhale turn your eyeballs upwards and immediately the third eye will turn itself upwards. Your consciousness will rise in the fountain of light at the top of the head and you'll reach right up. Exhale once more and bring all that light down and through the third eye. Instead of concentrating on the light emitted by your physical eyes, concentrate entirely on the third eye. This is the secret of looking into the souls of people. Do not simply identify with the beam that emerges from the pineal. You have to link it up with the spirit that descends, otherwise you develop a kind of hypnotic gaze. That's just what we don't want. (Page 66) It must always be beautiful, impersonal, heavenly, pure, untainted, not Luciferian light. The Sufis call it "generous light." It's not an inquiring ego light; it's a loving light.

The glance is set now; when you open your eyes you should be able to keep your eyes at infinity and not allow your eyes to be focused by the objects in front of you. You don't "see," you just cast light. It's a very wonderful practice and it's important because that's the way of using light to commune with people. That light of the Divine glance will cut right into the souls of people. It will not only reveal to you their deepest motivations and their attunement, but will reveal themselves to themselves, relieving them of the obstacles that stand in the way of unfurling their potentials. That is why the Divine glance is not only cognitive but also creative.

People begin to be aware of their light and get really high, exchanging, illuminating one another with the light of their eyes. Try it. It's a very tangible way of doing what you want to do while conversing with people, being involved with life.

Do this every day until it becomes strong in you. You have to be stronger than the environment; don't allow yourself to be conditioned by the environment. You are thrusting light; the light of the heavens is coming through you. Occasionally you could attune yourself to getting into the consciousness of the intelligences, the whole hierarchy of beings of light. Close your eyes, inhale, hold your breath and as you exhale open your eyes and cast that light forward. If you get a shock from the physical world when you open your eyes, just breathe through it and remember your attunement. Don't be afraid of opening your eyes as long as you keep your concentration; it's only for a short while when you're exhaling. If you want to protect your glance from the shock of contact with the physical world, you have to find yourself in a transfigured world; you mustn't let your consciousness get right down to the physical perspective of the universe. You are experiencing that which transpires behind that which appears. What appears is just an illusion anyway; it's not the way things are. Don't let yourself be caught in it.

God is the one who sees, and that through which he sees, and that which he sees. 

Ibn 'Arabi

All of a sudden you begin to see things as that rishi saw them. You find it difficult to get back into your ordinary thinking now because you've gone to a totally new way of thinking, the way the universe thinks. It is the Divine intention, the intimacy of the court. You're in the presence of the king, chosen to be privy to the Divine strategy.
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A Symphony of Light

Let us start with an analogy, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan's representation of the diffused light of the universe that is converged in each star. In a sense, a star is a vortex of light. In the example of a whirlpool, the water of the whole lake gets drawn into the axis that represents the epicenter of the whirlpool, and the same is true of a hurricane, the void gets shifted into a radiating center. Imagine that your aura is converging the light of the stars so that, instead of thinking that your body is absorbing the light of the stars, you identify with your aura. The light of the stars is drawn into a vacuum so that--we don't quite understand this in physics--light is converted into a potential, a subliminal state of light as you hold your breath. 

There is a vision I often have had, and it is a rain of light upon the surface of a lake. During your exhale, you could think of this vision. Each drop creates eddies, which keep on expanding further and further, and eventually compose within another, forming a wave interference pattern. Do that first, and then at some point you have the three pictures as you inhale, hold your breath, and exhale. Regardless of the breath, just concentrate on those three images.
I see Thy own image, Lord, in Thy creation.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Concentrate on the solar plexus as you converge the light of the stars, and go deep into the void as you hold your breath. As you exhale, instead of just thinking of your aura as an effulgent area, think of it as sparkling. Perhaps as you hold your breath, you could have the image of a kaleidoscope, where all the colors are intermeshing with each other. 

I think of the grand vision of Jelaluddin Rumi, when he says, "The galaxies are but a foam on the ocean of reality..." so that light is like a foam in its reality, becoming manifest. And then he said we come whirling out of nothing, just like that foam comes out of reality, which does not have a form. And, in this choreography, we dance. It is all God dancing around Himself. This gives you a dynamic rather than static vision of your aura as being part of the choreography of the heavens, so when you turn within, the light is diaphanous, but when you reach out, the light is sparkling, scintillating. 

There's another analogy, that you are a theme in the symphony of the spheres. You are just like the violinist, the cellist, or the trumpetist playing a theme, or many themes, that are not just part of the whole symphony but customize the symphony in an individuated way. 
Each human personality is like a piece of music, having an individual tone and a rhythm of its own.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan  (Page 68) 
In turn, the voice of each of these instruments contributes towards the symphony as a whole. Therefore, you see your individuality in the context of the totality. You see that your uniqueness is a way you customize the total reality in all its bounty, and in turn, it contributes towards the totality. 

The curious thing is that as you turn within, in order to customize the richness and bounty of that symphony, it has to go through a process of collapse, or annihilation so that you can draw a further dispensation, not from outside, but from inside. If you think of the universe as like a cross section of a multi-dimensional universe, you see we are continually drawing bounty not from within that three-dimensional cross section, but from the total universe. 

That is where inspiration comes; spontaneous thoughts that are not the result of previous thoughts or conditioning, but the emergence of something new in you. Instead of imagining a symphony, imagine a group of musicians who are now improvising, and so they are drawing their inspiration from inside, instead of outside. What is coming through is novel, and is going to enrich the manifested universe, the universe actuated in the existential state. 
When the soul is attuned to God, every action becomes music.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
Perhaps if you are very sensitive, and very quiet and very still, you'd be aware of a lot of vibrations in you: the pulsing of your blood, which corresponds to your heart beat; your breath, which represents a different rhythm than the pulsing of your blood or your heartbeat. If you are very sensitive, you can bring these in synch. For example, you could breathe in at the rhythm of four heartbeats, hold your breath eight heartbeats, and exhale four heartbeats. You could increase this, but I advise you not to overstress yourself. You could have five-ten-five, or six-twelve-six, and so on, but it must be absolutely effortless. It is just a matter of synchronizing two rhythms. It gives you a sense of a very harmonious state. 
My soul is moved to dance by the charm of Thy graceful movements, and my heart beateth the rhythm of Thy dancing steps. The deep impression of Thy sweet countenance, O Winner of my heart, covereth all visible things from my sight. My heart repeateth a thousand times the melody Thou playest on Thy flute; it setteth my soul in harmony with the whole universe.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There are the rhythms of the encephalogram; there are alpha, beta and delta. If you think of a waltz that is three beats, that gives you a sense of the alpha wave. We are not very aware of that, but by our concentration we can alter our brain waves to perhaps even reach into the delta state in deep sleep. It has been found that Yogis have been able to match the rhythm of the brain waves with their breath and their heartbeat; it is very much like tuning an instrument.
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 Entertaining Luminous Thoughts 

Let us translate this in terms of our thinking. In order to enhance our aura, we need to entertain luminous thoughts and, perhaps, synchronized thoughts. That means the thoughts are governed by definite rhythm, pulsing in an orderly fashion, whereas thoughts are very often mixed up, confused, ambiguous. 

In the analogy of light, we entertain luminous thoughts, and think we are converging a plethora of thoughts accruing to us from the psychological environment, and we are weaving them into a coherent, cohesive and meaningful tapestry. That tapestry is not simply a copy of the environment, but enlists our own creativity. We are making something meaningful from a lot of elements that are separate until they are connected in a meaningful way. 

That is your contribution to that which accrues to you from outside. For example, if you are a painter, availing yourself of a palette of colors, the important thing is what you do with those colors. If you just dwell upon the colors, you are not making a painting. If you are meditating and simply regurgitating impressions from outside, it's all very disorderly and consequently you can't see meaningfulness. It is the way the universe self-organizes itself in each one of us that is going to bring order into that chaos. When you are meditating, you need to see the importance of your impact upon the incoming thoughts. That is what everyone calls creativity. 

Now so far, I have been talking about thoughts that emerge impromptu, spontaneously from inside, and don't seem to be causally related with the impressions accruing from outside. They are related in a non-causal way--an acausal way as one says now in physics--not as a cause that brings about an effect, but as a catalyst that unleashes potentials that are latent. These spontaneous thoughts that have been catalyzed and unleashed will alter our assessment of our problems, just like the enzymes of our food will alter the composition of the amino acids of the foods we ingest. This is enlisting our uniqueness. It revives a very strong sense of who we are. Of course we have a need to adapt ourselves to the psychological environment, but in so doing, we tend to lose our identity. The opposite would be adapting the environment to our own sense of purpose. There is a balance between the two. 
Our thoughts have prepared for us the happiness or unhppiness we experience.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan 
In-between the two there's the light in its implicate state, which in physics is called the light field. Even below that there's a state called the scaler level, the subliminal level, which could be described as the state of two teams of people who are pulling a cord on either side; if their force is equal, the energy present is potential rather than active. When you are turning within, what the Sufis call (Page 70) kemal, there's potential energy there that needs just that little pull on one side or the other to break loose into a tremendous burst of energy. 

With an outburst of energy of your thoughts, which are sparkling and become crystal clear, just like when light is fragmented into sparks it becomes very distinct, this is in contrast to the all-pervading light where everything is intermeshed with everything else. The clarity of those thoughts is the measure of your realization. Walter Chappel calls this active thinking instead of passive thinking, so that you are impacting the environment with the power of your thought. The power comes by the distinctiveness of each thought. 
When we devote ourselves to the thought of God, all illumination and revelation is ours.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Do the practice of Shaghal now. If you'll remember, there are two stages. The first is when you concentrate on the solar plexus as you inhale, access the all-pervading light from inside, and then radiate it forth from the heart center as you exhale. The second stage is that as you turn within, you draw light through your eyes. That light builds up in the brain and as you exhale, you are conscious of the light inside the brain that threads through the optic nerves and which impinges upon outer space, passing through the retina and the cornea. The cornea is like a lens. 

You have already learned to do this. Consciously draw light through your eyes. You can do it with your eyelids closed, because the light you will be drawing, you will be filtering. The light you draw into your brain is of ultraviolet frequency. Instead of thinking of the light of the stars, you may think of cosmic rays, neutrinos, or light that is not visible. The light that passes between the electrons and neutrons in the cell has to be very fine, very high frequency. 

If you hold your breath after inhaling, you make a quantum leap into identifying with the light of intelligence. Remember your whole aura begins to burn more brightly under the impact of realization, that "Aha!" sense of meaningfulness. The same applies to your glance. Now you are conscious of the impact of illumination, the light of intelligence upon the light of your glance. What is important is that we are threading a light through the light of the glance, a light within the light. You must think this light is incisive and reveals that which the ordinary, passive operation of your eyes cannot see, cannot grasp. It is like casting a searchlight in the dark corners of the world. 

Do the practice of Shaghal again, and instead of concentrating on the solar plexus, concentrate on the pituitary gland as you turn within and radiate from that point. Actually, I represent to myself violet light passing through a stream of blue light. This is a light within a light. The ultraviolet acts like an x-ray. You could take your index fingers away when you are exhaling, because it's easier to imagine that light is now reaching out. Your fingers seem to be in the way, but of course ultraviolet light would pass through your fingers. 
 (Page 71) 
There is a further point which is very fine, the function of the pineal gland as compared with the pituitary gland. Both of these are very important in Yoga. We know the pineal gland is not just a hormonal gland, an endocrine gland, but it is light sensitive, so it is also an organ of perception that is very finely tuned. It governs light, the day and night rhythm of our planets and of ourselves, but it is sensitive to very high frequency light. (The question in my mind is whether it links us to the light at the center of our galaxy, the light that is converged by the sun, and whether you could consider the whole galaxy as being a sun.) 

We think the sun is up there somewhere, but the sun does not have a boundary, so the planet Earth is really in the sun. The sun--and that means also the planet Earth--is within the light and the center of the galaxy which acts like a sun in comparison to a planetary system, so it's not whether we derive a lot of energy from the sun, but whether there is not another finer energy we derive from the center of the galaxy. 

We are beginning to become aware of not just planetary consciousness, but galactic consciousness. We realize our thoughts monitor the thinking of the universe and get distorted by our self-image, which is not what we are, just like the rays of the sun get distorted by the gravity pull of the Earth. Our thinking is the thinking of the universe, but distorted. It is not our thinking; it's somehow cosmic. When we do away with that distortion, then thoughts become crystal clear. 
 (Page 72) 
Light and Mahasabi -- Looking at the Shadow

This meditation is based upon two wazaif in reference to the practice called Muhasabi, the examination of one's conscience. Those two wazaif are Haqq, truth, and Hakim, the judgment of truth. 
In the spheres of conscience the soul of man and the Spirit of God meet and become one.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We are going to connect these practices with Muhasabi, looking into our shadow side; casting the light upon our shadow so it disappears. This is like, in A Night on Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky, when the light of dawn comes the devil starts rushing away. We are entertaining luminous thoughts and luminous emotions. 

Truth can act as a bomb, and truth can be painful, but pain is part of the catharsis that takes place. We hold people in our hearts, protecting their self-esteem. Sometimes we can bring the truth inside that containment. For example, it's better for the garden if we take away the weeds; it's good for the body sometimes to give the bacteria a good bang on the head. It's a kind act in the end. 
All things which one seeks in God such as light, life, strength, joy and peace, these all can be found in truth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
In working with light, I have distinguished four different forms of light. One was the light we absorbed from the environment, and it was processed within us and transmitted in our radiance. That is not the same thing that happens in a mirror. It's not reflected; rather it has been processed in the very cells of our body. We are not just boomeranging back the light of the environment. 

Then there was a light from within that Pir-o-Murshid calls the 'all-pervading light'. That is, for physicists, rather paradoxical. They concur, though they are using a different language than I am. The way I explain it is we live in a multi-dimensional world and we are only able to extrapolate between three dimensions. Whatever we cannot fit into that framework breaks through this cross section which is our three-dimensional world. If we can't fit it in, we experience it as all-pervading, not light that radiates from a point in space, but light that is diffused, the light that emerges from within. As Pir-o-Murshid says, we shift that light from being all-pervading to being radiant, by shifting our attention from our solar plexus to our heart. The solar plexus gives us a sense of penetrating into the deep void. The void just means that it is beyond our grasp. It's something that is happening unconsciously. At some point it emerges, and we become aware of it. 
 (Page 73) 
It's a fantastic source of light; much more effective than the light we absorb from the environment. There's a whole hierarchy of light, modes of light ranging from physical light to levels of light that we can only grasp in a whole different sense. It is very difficult in our language, but the only way to say this is we are talking about the reflex of the reflex of the reflex of light. That's an analogy, but it gives a sense that what we understand by light is only a very small slice of the reality of light in all its modes, in all its range. 

Consider each of the chakras as the kind of light each emits, like the different colors in the spectrum, although they actually correspond with different frequencies. We interpret those frequencies as color. Ultimately, we get to a point where there is a kind of quantum leap. We pass through a blackout, then reach beyond that blackout where our notion of light is totally eradicated; it collapses. Then suddenly we have a whole different sense of light, which the Sufis call the light of intelligence, and which the Tibetans call the clear light of bliss. 

 The Flash of Intelligence 

The extraordinary thing is you can see the relationship between this light and what we call awakening. That's why we use two words that are really in tandem. One is awakening and the other is illumination. Those two concepts are very, very close. That is why working with light presents us with some kind of help in triggering off awakening. It's much more tangible than abstract thoughts when we have something with which we can work. The light of intelligence comes as a kind of flash that the Tibetans call Vajra, which means lightening. It has the effect of enhancing the light of our aura dramatically, like all of a sudden turning on a light bulb. 
Intelligence is the light of life, the life of life, and the essence of the whole Being.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
I illustrate this sometimes with the story I mentioned earlier in this volume about a little child. The mother says, "Can you see the pixie in the tree in that puzzle?" At first the little girl can't see it, then all of a sudden, "Yes!" At that moment she starts smiling; her whole being starts beaming. I dare say if we were to subject her at the time to a laboratory experiment, we would see the radiance of her aura had greatly increased. There we have mind over body, the effect of realization upon the radiance of our body, our aura. That's a reality. That's good for people who have difficulty in believing in all we do, and think it is imagination. Imagination is a key; the reality does get demonstrated in laboratories. The light upon a light. The Sufis say the light that sees enhances the light that can be seen and these are two of the categories of light. 

Instead of directing this light downwards upon our aura so it starts radiating, we can thread it through the optic nerve. Actually it's like a zephyr on a stream of water. We can infuse it through the glance of our eyes. This could be illustrated by the river Rhone passing through the lake of Geneva. Pir-o-Murshid says our (Page 74) glance becomes like two search lights which are looking right into the soul of beings. This light gives us insight. 

That's three sources of light. The fourth is the ability to transmute infrared light into ultraviolet. It's related to the phenomenon of phosphorescence, instead of florescence. Florescence it the way we process the light of the environment and radiate it. Phosphorescence is a quality we find in fireflies, for example, or when bats in a cave or deep sea fish burn their bodies to produce light. The light that is produced is basically infrared, and is transmuted into light within the physical range. That's why we can see light in fireflies. 

It's a very important function; it is the process that governs resurrection. We are preparing ourselves for resurrection by learning how to transmute our body into light, our electrons into photons. Many of the practices we are doing now are effective in dealing with that scare we have about death. As you know, the Tibetans are very much for preparing one's self for that great event.
Death for the spiritual souls is only a gate through which they enter into that sphere which every soul knows to be its home.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There is a mode of thought for each form of light. I have said, for example that we entertain luminous thoughts. What does that mean? First, remember in the elementary practice we consciously absorb light through the pores of our skin as we inhale. As we hold our breath, we are conscious of the jiggling and the sparkling of the cells of our body that are really enthused by the administration of light energy. They are fed with light, and now the consequence is that they start dividing in the process of mitosis. There is an expenditure of light and energy and, having used that light energy, whatever remains is radiated in the form of the aura. 

That's at the body level. What happens at the mind level is the first stage in meditation. Exactly as the body is absorbing elements from the environment, our psyche is absorbing elements from the psychological environment. It gets impressions of all kinds, from walking in the streets and there is an accident, or having a chat with somebody, watching TV, going to a class, reading books. Our psyche is nurtured by a lot of impressions which are psychically imbibed. Then we need to digest those impressions, which are random at first. It's quite a problem to try to make a nice tapestry out of all those random, colored threads and weave them into a meaningful pattern. That also means eliminating those that cannot be incorporated into the tapestry. 

When we take in impressions, they are related to our involvement with life and with beings other than ourselves. One of the basic things I've been saying and that is becoming more and more clear, is that when we start meditating, our assessment of our thoughts really is giving us some clues as to our problems. We are assessing our problems in a biased way because we are biased by our particular vantage point. Our assessment is perhaps a valid point of view, but it is not a comprehensive point of view. We have been carrying that bias in our psyche (Page 75) throughout our life, being convinced that our assessment of our problem is correct, and we ponder upon the problems. Now, when I talk about casting a light upon our problems, we cast our light upon our ponderous thoughts. That means we are casting something of ourselves upon the psychological food that we are imbibing. There is always the interaction between ourselves and the other-than-ourselves that gets incorporated into ourselves. 
The plain truth is too simple for the seeker after complexity, who is looking for things he cannot understand.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
What is important here is the clarity of our thoughts. At first, our thoughts are very confused. For example, there is a confusion between that in us which is the witness, that in us which is our psyche, and that in us which is our assessment of our problems. We have three elements there that are, first of all, mixed up, and second, each of which is flawed by inadequacy. 

Metaphorically, light makes for clarity. The first thing is to be quite clear about the difference between our assessment of our problems and what are our problems. We are grappling with our concepts of problems instead of our problems. At this level, clarity makes clearer distinctions. There is an emotional bias in the mind and we are not clear about it. We are deceiving ourselves because we are trying to justify ourselves. The mind carries its own confusion unless we bring about clarity. Our self-esteem is so vulnerable that our mind comes to our rescue to protect ourselves against the light that would shatter us. That confusion is written right into our programming in order to protect us in a perfunctory way, from our difficulty in coping with the truth. It requires a lot of courage to face the truth. That's something we gain as we move from childhood into adulthood. The effect of this confusion is that we are making a kind of compromise in our minds. As we say sometimes, we would like to have our cake and eat it at the same time. I often use the phrase 'reconciling the irreconcilables,' but we must not confuse that with compromise. It is not the same thing. 

At first, the mind works in what one might call thinking in categories as Immanuel Kant says in The Categories of Reason, by what one calls discrete thoughts, like particles in physics. One thinks they have their own identity instead of waves, where it is much more difficult to see exactly what are those particularities. That's how we start. That's how the mind functions in its most elementary way. At first there is confusion, and we have to be careful in meditation because the mind tends to diffuse itself into nowhere in a lack of conciseness. As one turns within, the mind is able to act in a holistic fashion. It is able to see everything in its interaction with everything else, as it is intermeshed in the holistic view, what Dr. David Bohm calls the implicate state. 

Let's look at the light that is imbibed from the environment, and the kind of thinking corresponding with that light. Our concern about truth is going to clarify those thoughts, hence the wazaif, ya Haqq -- ya Hakim. Our concern about truth, Haqq, is going to have an effect upon our judgment about the way we look  (Page 76) at our problems, and therefore unmask the hoax of our personal bias. It is of no use to say our assessment of our problems is faulty; how do we clarify it? 
You cannot live truth; you can realize it.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
There is an adjoining tandem practice, which is, ya Haqq -- ya Nur. That comes very often in the words of Pir-o-Murshid, "The light of truth." We could build a metaphor as we are meditating, and imagine our thoughts are in limbo. Our thoughts are at the threshold between the unconscious and conscious and not very clear. There is some kind of mish-mash in our thinking. Now all of a sudden, we are casting light upon it. These thoughts are confused because it is painful to face the reality. 
A humiliated conscience dims the radiance of the countenance.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We are protecting ourselves against what we find difficult to face. That is our darkest night because it destroys our self-esteem. That's why we need to have some protection, and that protection comes by a thought: the voice of Caruso. Within the distortion and defilement of our being the purity of our immaculate state remains untarnished. Even though it is within, it is tarnished and at the same time, we have a pure core in the center of our being, as Saint Teresa of Avila says. She calls it the fine point of the soul which is immaculate. Outside it is defiled by the overlap with the environment. That would be a simplistic way of thinking -- we need to find that core within ourselves, and so on -- a dualistic way of thinking. 

The more advanced way of thinking is that the immaculate state interpenetrates its own defilement. That's a way of thinking that isn't familiar. It is very surprising to be able to think that way, but of course it is illustrated in physics. For example, we lose sight of a wave when it is intermeshed with other waves in a wave interference pattern, yet, we can retrieve it. That shows it has remained unscathed within its interaction with other waves. It's a different mode of thinking, and that is a saving grace. If we are able to hold that, then we are more capable of facing our shadow because it doesn't take away our self-esteem. 

If you are a teacher, you uphold the dignity of your pupil which would be impaired if you were to criticize your pupil. When you are upholding that, the pupil feels a kind of safe, protective containment, and has difficulty in reconciling it with his/her own awareness of his/her own defects. You need to help the pupil by casting light upon these defects while helping him/her feel safe, and that will not impair his/her self-esteem. It's like keeping a person alive, for example, while he/she is undergoing a heart operation. That is a Sufi method. It's a very subtle method of working with people. All the time your light is being mirrored by the person, and they can see how you are enhancing their light by your light. Consequently, that light will start bringing the defects into the open, (Page 77) because that which is blocking everything is denial. Haqq does not tolerate denial, so that which is denied is unmasked. 
The soul in its journey onward strikes a plane where it exclaims, 'I am the truth.'
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
That's what I mean by innocence; it's the inability to defend our self by justification, and the inability to use guile and manipulation in our strategy in life. If we don't deceive ourselves then we don't deceive people. It's the same relationship between the two. 
Innocence is the natural condition of the soul and the lack of innocence is a foreign element which the soul acquires after coming on Earth.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
We deceive our self by denial because we try to preserve our self-esteem, and if our self-esteem is okay, then we don't need to deny and we can face our shadow. The moment we bring our shadow out into the open, it dissolves. We don't have to fight it. 

If we look into the metaphysics of the Sufis, the whole of life is the tajaliat, the manifestation of the non-manifest. That is bringing to light that which is nebulous, that which is subliminal. That's the meaning of Zahir; the Epiphany, the sudden outburst of light, the emergence from under a bushel, almost like an explosion. The word Zahir is the equivalent of the Greek word epiphanos. The men followed the star that was leading them to the emergence of light in the child Jesus on the day of the Epiphany. That is Zahir. 

There are several practices. You could do ya Nur -- ya Zahir, or ya Haqq -- ya Zahir, or both. It's extraordinary. It's as though something that had been hidden all of a sudden comes out in your being and gives you a tremendous power. It's the power of truth. 
Truth is the light which illuminates the whole of life; in its light all things become clear, and their true nature manifests to view.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If you are doing the breathing practice, as you inhale, you think the light you are imbibing from the cosmos is being cast in the dark areas of your psyche. Then there is that period of incubation as you hold you breath, and as you exhale, all of a sudden those dark elements begin to emerge and are then dissolved in the light.  (Page 78) 
The souls of all are from one and the same source, but a soul which is unveiled shines out. Love and light come continually from such souls. We need no proof of it, for it is living; all else is dead in comparison.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
In Sufism, the spiritual process is a process of unveiling. Unveiling is the action of the universe upon us, instead of our action upon the universe because there are two modes of knowledge, acquired knowledge and revealed knowledge. Acquired knowledge is the know-how gained in our experience in life that makes for wisdom. Revealed knowledge is something we cannot acquire. It is the way the consciousness of the universe breaks through our consciousness, which is of course a convergence of the light of the consciousness of the universe. That's where God comes in. He/She is already there. It's not that He/She comes in, but we have to admit there are things a little bit too challenging for us to do with our will. We could say the Divine will is written right into our will of course, it just depends how we see it. 

Martin Luther called it the significatio passiva. We think we are passive in respect to the Divine action, but our passivity becomes activity as our will takes over from the self-organizing faculty of the universe. The universe has a way of self-organizing itself in each one of us, and at some point we have to take over, just like a musician will make variations on a theme that has been allotted to him/her. 

As an illustration, say there's a mouse in our hut and we put a flashlight on. All of a sudden the mouse leaps out of the light to get back into the shadow again, but we don't allow it to do that. That's the way our light is able to unmask the hoax and bring it out into the open. 
 (Page 79) 
The Temple of Light

A sensitive person has a great need for the sacred. One needs to protect one's very fragile soul against the turbulence and grossness, vulgarity and ruthlessness one finds in the world. How can one be in the world but not of the world? How can one be an ascetic in the middle of married life with children? How does one preserve one's attunement where one's soul is being pummeled all the time from all directions?

In the course of history our societies have built temples and churches in order to seek refuge, so one is able to find one's soul again in favorable circumstances. The purpose of the temple is to provide a safe place for worship, to give expression to the nostalgia of our soul. The nomads, whether they were Jews or Arabs, found that since they were always on the move they could not rely upon a place where they could find peace and the sacred attunement of their being. They realized they had to create their own temple. Living in our modern societies, we might benefit by dedicating a room in our home that would be a temple for meditation, but not all of us can afford even that in our crowded lives. The answer is to build an inner temple out of our own being.

The temple provides a threshold marking a very definite transit from the profane to the sacred, and marking a protection so you are able to find peace within your self without being subjected to the impressions coming in from all sides. You can seek refuge in that temple, even when you are right in the middle of activity, because you have built the temple from within. It's always there.

 Drawing Light from Within 

A good model is Buddha sitting in the middle of a storm. The center of a whirlpool or a whirlwind is a vacuum. The Buddhist conception of peace is not escape, but an active, all-pervading peace that gains ground and pushes away the turbulence accruing from outside. The sense is being able to touch upon that inner peace that suffuses our being from within.

How do you create this temple out of the fabric of your being? You draw light from within, instead of from without. You need to absorb it. Your temple could be a temple of light. 

The secret is in the practice that is the very heart of Yoga practices, called Yoni Mudra, and also Sufi practices, called Shaghal. It is a way of communicating from within. Consciousness is always interfacing experience from without. If you find the doors closed, then consciousness is able to discover the world from within. The threshold builds a protective membrane. It's just like the cathedral. There are windows, so this is not a total separation from the outside world, but still you communicate from inside. (Page 80) 
This is not my body, it is the temple of God; this is not my heart, it is the altar in the temple of God. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Building the Temple

How do you build this temple of light? You could perform the Dhikr of light. As you go into the circle with your head moving from left to right think of your aura as a temple of light. At the same time you are evacuating the center to have a space for the presence of God. You invite the Presence, encouraging the all-pervading light from within. You can imagine it is like the candles on the altar. 

In building this very sacred temple it is important to remember that the cells of the body absorb light from the environment, including cosmic rays from outer space. The cells emit as well as transmit light into the environment. The aura in its purely physical aspect is constituted by the radiation of this light that sparkles as the cells divide in mitosis, the nerve cells being the most effective. Since the brain is made of an intense concentration of nerve cells, the brain is lit up from inside. The optic nerves, being an extension of the brain, project the middle range frequencies of this light through the retina and cornea into space, but the high frequency ultraviolet light passes through the skull and can be beamed by dint of visualization.

Visualizing a form projects part of the aura into a real light structure in space, like a hologram. This structure is greatly enhanced by moving the body repeatedly in a regular architectonic motion.
The exercise of Dhikr sets the heart to rhythm. 
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
Imagine that you are gazing courageously into a blinding light. 
To look into the sun, one has to have eyes like the sun. 
Plotinus
Close your eyelids, turn your eyeballs upwards, and as you inhale, concentrate on the intense light in the brain. Visualize the corona of sparkling diaphanous light, colorless and diamond-like, although flickering flashes of multi-colored light appear as a corona above your head. Now hold your breath with your eyeballs still turned upwards. Focus above your head, and fix your attention on the intelligence you represent as having the ability to cast light upon things, yet not a physical light. As you exhale, imagine the luminous intensity of your awareness and wakefulness enhancing the effulgence of the beams, which you visualize as sky blue cast from your eyes. Moreover, visualize a third beam you imagine to be violet, cast forward through the middle of your forehead.
 (Page 81) 
As you inhale with eyes upturned, visualize the corona. Now as you exhale, converge the two beams of your glance, which are blue, into a spotlight suspended in the void, approximately six feet ahead. Concentrate on the violet beam breaking through the blue spotlight. Visualize the spotlight as a blue sapphire being traversed by a violet beam. At this stage as you exhale, notice the green hue emitted by your pharyngeal plexus, your throat chakra, and the glorious golden radiance of your cardiac plexus, the heart chakra.

The moment has come to begin the motion of the Dhikr of light. As you exhale, rotate your upper body counter-clockwise around that pivot of your body that is the solar plexus. First describe a violet circle with your third eye, accompanied by a blue concentric circle. Now the diamond-like, colorless with flashing hues outer circle is described by your head, and the golden inner circle by your heart. By sheer force of repetition, these circles become almost indelible. You have literally constructed a whole structure of light around your body, numberless bands of hues aligned in concentric circles after the model of the spectrum, like a rainbow. By widening the circles, they appear as ever-extending spirals, a vortex of light.

To extend these into concentric spheres instead of two-dimensional vortices, you now rotate your head and upper body forward and downward, then upward again as you inhale, eventually returning to the left and right motion as you exhale. We now have two meridians building a three-dimensional light structure. Notice the left-right motion conveys the impression of an ever-widening sphere which is centrifugal, whereas the forward-backward motion gives you the impression of drawing within, centripetal. The protective membrane of the temple is your radiance, not a barrier; it filters and transmutes light from the environment. You have fashioned with your aura a temple of light. It is a splendid vortex of light in that infinite temple of light shaped by the galaxies.

You introduce a moment of retention of your breath between the inhaling and the exhaling, so toward the end of the inhaling, you concentrate on the void in the solar plexus. Immediately shift your attention from the solar plexus to the heart chakra, and you experience this upward flow of newborn life, energy and radiance.
Verily, the heart that reflects the Divine light is illuminated.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
If you were endowed with the spirit of a dervish and started revolving, like the Mevlevi, the meridians, being circles or spirals of light, would indubitably form an ever-extending sphere of sheer effulgence. You are dancing, revolving like a star in the choreography of light of the heavens!

Still holding your breath, you quicken your heart chakra with the breath of pure spirit--which you experience descending in the temple of light you built--through an aperture at the top. You are being receptive to the light of intelligence (Page 82) descending into the center of the temple. The light from the heavens descends, meets the light emerging from inside, and the two congregate in the altar. Now as you hold your breath, the light of pure intelligence descends upon the altar in your heart. You have the impression that the temple of light has been transfigured into a further temple of subtler light that appears to adumbrate the temple of physical light, and seems positioned a little higher up, space-wise. This feeling may be perpetrated further and further in infinite regress.

Our glorification strengthens this level of our being. It's not our imagination any more, nor our realization. It's our glorification. Instead of just thinking of the temple, you could think that you're the priest in the temple. You're performing a cosmic celebration service at the altar, and you're in ecstasy. You're so deeply moved by the miracle of what's happening. The influence from above is being felt in anticipation of that moment when we hold our breath, and experience the Holy Spirit, but it's not samadhi. 

Move your head to its normal position, the glance horizontal. Breathe. Imagine the circle as a spiral as you exhale, and then the convergence in the center. Imagine the upward motion, and then the descending motion. Imagine the sequence of thought and simply stay in a state of suspense without thought because you have triggered off thoughts at higher levels of your being of which you may not be aware in your ordinary mind, but they are there. Think of the mind and think of the heart and think of the soul. There are different levels of thinking and at the soul level it's not formulated in categories of thoughts broken up into fragments. It's more realization than thinking. 

Now focus on the light. A very beautiful temple is being built out of the fabric of the light of your own being. One is forming a protective membrane by whirling that light, yet one is also radiating that light so it's not just a protective mechanism, but it has a radiating force, and that radiation acts as protection. As radiation comes, it radiates from the heart, from the altar in the temple.

Your aura is now the temple. You may be aware of the flame in the center of your aura, and that is what will give you a sense of being able to hoist your consciousness into the abstract planes within the temple. 

The temple offers you protection in order to be able to hoist yourself. Think of the aperture at the top of the temple. You know the concept of the descent of the Holy Spirit, but there is also the opposite, the ability to hoist your being, to be able at any moment to let your consciousness enter the higher planes within the temple and beyond the temple.

You protect the sacred from the profanity of the world by the power of your aura. We not only need to fashion this temple, but also fulfill our human role in the temple as priest, as knight, as hermit, as devotee, as musician, as verger, as sweeper, and many more. (Page 83) 
What the moon seems to give as light, is not its own; it is the light of the sun. So it is with the Divine messengers.
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
The Sufis speak about the light that can be seen and the light that sees. The light that can be seen is the light of your aura, which is the temple you're building, but the light that sees is not your aura. It's the way your intelligence beams upon all things, like a laser beam in a hologram. You could think of the temple as a hologram of light, with several levels in the hologram. You have a temple of light and you're beaming the light of your awakened intelligence upon this hologram of light, which then begins to burst into a tremendous outbreak of light. You're exalted in the emotion, and the emotion is the ecstasy of light. You have an impression of something absolutely magnificent, and you realize you are the temple of light.

Ecstasy is a well of light and love which rises from the bottom of man's heart, and so high that it washes away all worries and troubles of life. The condition of man's heart depends on its reflection of this Divine Light, as the condition of the sea depends on its reflection of the Cosmic Light. The cosmic changes make the sea agitated or calm. In one's heart there are moments of calm so great that it charges the whole atmosphere, and moments when the forces rise in man, and wash away all troubles and worldly things. A poet or a gifted musician feels the same, and if you ask me why, I will say that it is that he could not create beauty, unless he were an instrument of Divine Beauty, which is the greatest creator. (Page 84) 
Ecstasy is a well of light and love which rises from the bottom of man's heart, and so high that it washes away all worries and troubles of life. The condition of man's heart depends on its reflection of this Divine Light, as the condition of the sea depends on its reflection of the Cosmic Light. The cosmic changes make the sea agitated or calm. In one's heart there are moments of calm so great that it charges the whole atmosphere, and moments when the forces rise in man, and wash away all troubles and worldly things. A poet or a gifted musician feels the same, and if you ask me why, I will say that it is that he could not create beauty, unless he were an instrument of Divine Beauty, which is the greatest creator.
Of course a mystic who dives deep, and makes his heart an instrument of the Divine Being, experiences a greater ecstasy. As the sea responds to the cosmos more than the land, so the heart of the mystic responds to the Divine Light more than the heart of the average man. His heart is liquid, and that of the average man as frozen snow. Where does this freezing come from, since snow is also water? It comes from the thought of 'I', my father, my mother, my beloved, my friend, mine, and separate from yours. Whereas the first lesson of the mystic is, "Thou art, and not I." It is not only complete surrender to God, it is self-effacement. What does the symbol of the cross explain? That "Thou art, not me, my hands are not for me, my feet are not for me, my head is not for me, they are all Thine."
Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan. Works of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, 
"Mysticism," Mysticism VI, The Path of the Mystic.


Healing


First Edition, July 1998

The material in this volume was drawn mainly from transcriptions of presentations by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan at conferences sponsored and produced by the Sufi Healing Order in November 1997 in Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia; and in August 1997 at the Abode of the Messsage, New Lebanon, New York. Portions of this booklet have been published in Heart and Wings under the title:  Practices for Healers. 

Transcriptions were compiled, organized, and edited by Sarmad Tide and copyedited by Dorothy Craig. Special thanks to the corps of volunteer transcribers, through whose dedicated service the Sufi Order Secretariat is able to make Pir Vilayat's latest teachings available in a timely manner. 

Part I:  The Structure
 (Page 1) 
 Who We Are and What We Do 

We would so much like to help people who are suffering, but I would like to warn people against ever claiming to be able to heal people, and asking them not to have medical care. First it is illegal, and second it is very well possible to combine spiritual healing with medical care. Medicine has improved tremendously in the course of the last decades, and what is more, doctors are beginning to look into the alternative of meditation. I think medication does include meditation as a matter of fact. There is no reason they shouldn't go together, but it has to be totally up front. We need to have the approval of the doctor too. Doctors have become a little wiser in the course of history and most don't think they have all the answers. 

There is no doubt that really miraculous cures have happened. As you know, my father came from a country where there are many cases of extraordinary, unbelievable cures. The Nizam of Hyderbad was able to cure people with cobra bites who would have died within a few minutes. Quite a number of cases of remission of cancer, and so on, are unaccountable by the norms of science. 

What we want to do is learn how to cure--how to use our healing. I think we all have an inborn capacity for life and communicating life to people. That's what healing is about, communicating further energy in order to combat whatever is harmful to the body--the infection, or whatever--to strengthen the immune system for example. Basically we are working with energy, and the energy of the human being is just the way in which the energy of the universe is customized through the person and limited by the self-image of the person. 

The secret of being able to shunt that energy that moves the Universe into our healing, through our person, is to connect up with the Universe. I must admit the most successful healers I know of in India are people who are living the life of a recluse, in caves, in mountains. I've lived amongst the sanyassins in the Himalayas; they and the dervishes who live amongst the ruins of the tombs of the great saints -- in Ajmer, for example, and in Afghanistan and Iran--have extraordinary healing powers. 

My question is how can we combine this with living a normal life? I think the life of a recluse is one that does not validate all the values that have been achieved by our great civilizations--building of cathedrals, and space craft, and computers--all those wonderful things that have made our life more convenient on one hand, and more of a hassle, if I can use that word, on the other. We have built a wonderful support system for the progress of intelligence on the planet. Actually we can say the star dust after the big bang has fashioned itself, in the course of (Page 2) evolution, into human beings who are able to carry the intelligence of the Universe further all the time. We're right in the middle of that process. We're half way, maybe a quarter of the way. I don't know. The important thing is that we gain a sense of what we are in the Universe. Instead of thinking of ourselves as individuals, thinking, "How do I connect up with the totality that has come through me?" It is that expansion of consciousness, or that realization, that gives us access to the power that moves the universe. Otherwise we are using our own power, and that's limited, very limited. In fact it doesn't work. 

The trouble is, our civilizations tend to bring us into our personal sense of identity--which is not what we are, but how we are conditioned by the environment. The support system takes over. Imagine that we are like a team of alchemists who are trying to climb the high mountains and we spend so much energy setting up the base camps that there's hardly any energy to reach the top. That's what we're doing. We are giving priority to that which is urgent rather than that which is important. The consequence is we lose our self-esteem, or we have low self-esteem, or at least inadequate self-esteem. Ultimately our self-esteem, if we become God conscious, would be humiliating our Divine status. We would be hurting the Divine being by denigrating ourselves. Very often people--patients--feel sorry for themselves. It is connected with the self-image. Therefore we need to have a whole new vision of who we are. 
 (Page 3) 
 Two Modes of Healing 

There are two ways of healing. At least I'm trying to highlight two. One is working with energy, and the other is through realization. This must be an experience rather than just my words. We must feel the forces that move the galaxies--and eventually the sap in the trees--a kind of cosmic power, which the Sufis call the Divine power. We limit it by our self-image. 

We are challenged in our way of thinking. The only way to do this is to apply the holistic paradigm of science--to realize that every fraction of the totality carries within it the potential of the totality. We are not just fragments of the totality. Within each fragment the totality is potentially present. This teaches us not to use our personal power, or will, to heal a person, but to become totally aware of the enormous power of reality coming through. We are working with power, yes, but it's always limited in some way by our sense of identity. 

Our immune system is based upon our sense of identity, our physical identity. It's exactly the same in the body as it is in the psyche. For example, if you transplant an organ, the body is going to reject that organ if it doesn't have the same DNA as the body. There must be a recognition of the identity. There is another form of activity of the immune system in which it adapts itself to the environment. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to eat. We have the ability to imbibe elements of the environment which are foreign to ourselves. That's a question of adaptation. 

The greater we are the more room we have in our being for other beings. The smaller we are the more intolerant we are of other beings. In order to be able to cure, we have to love. We have to love people who make themselves difficult to love. In fact, we have to love people we condemn, and love them at the same time, and support them. We are challenged in our love. 

If I say, "Can you feel that power coming in?" we must be wary of the danger that our ego would come up, and we would confuse it with Divine power. Of course that's happening all the time. So we have to be careful. On the other hand, we have to be powerful to heal, instead of meek. How can we combine these two things at the same time? Think of Christ who was very powerful and very gentle at the same time. 

It is a matter of what the Sufis call God consciousness. That is something we learn in meditation--to try to have some kind of sense of the antipolar standpoint from our own standpoint: the Divine point of view. How do we reach beyond our personal identity, or the vantage point of our personal consciousness? (Page 4) One way is to think of ourselves as being seen by God instead of trying to know more about God. We don't understand what we really mean by God. We have moments when something comes through which is totally unexpected and shatters us, and we feel as though we are invested with an incredible power. It happens in a flash. On one hand the shattering, and on the other being absolutely overwhelmed. 

We are using only a sliver of our faculties--the kind of faculties that allow us to cross the road without being hit by a car, or go to the supermarket, the kind of faculties that allow us to be able to survive in our very challenging civilization. These are faculties that some of us who are functional in life have been able to muster. People who are homeless are people who have not been able to live up to that challenge. My heart goes out to them. They are the victims of our greed. 

There is another thing. In order to heal, we not only need compassion for the sufferings of people, but we have to be very scrupulous about being truthful. The power of the dervish is that the dervish actually cannot stand a ploy, a dishonesty, manipulation. It all starts by asking ourselves, "What am I doing in life? What are my values?" I know we have to survive, but we are vulnerable to becoming dependent upon that underpinning. We take it for granted. These are things that we need. We have to shower, and we have to have a car. We have to eat, and so on. We take that for granted. 

The trouble is that the strategy of the ego is reactive. That is, we build a defense system to deal with the egos of the other people which strengthens us in our ego consciousness. By so doing we're not using all the potentials of our being. It takes a lot to be able to wean ourselves from our dependence upon our aggressive ego strategies, and trust the potentials, the power of our being, the Divine power of our being, instead of relying upon our ego power. That's the secret of healing. 

In India they say it's below the dignity of elephants to be bugged by the agitations of chickens. If we think of that like Divine power in us, then we don't get upset. We don't use our ego to fight people because we have Divine power. We can tolerate the stupidity of people. As Christ said, "They don't know what they do." We don't judge people anymore, because they are what they are. Why be upset about what they are doing? That takes away our power. We want to do something for them instead of being sorry for ourselves. 

Another thing very important for healing is that at the core of our being we can find what we call an immaculate state. I think that's the meaning of the immaculate state of the Virgin Mary. It's very difficult for us to reconcile that with the defilement in our being. We feel, if we have any conscience, ashamed about the things we did wrong, that hurt people. That takes away our power. We have to be truthful about our misdeeds. Some of us, I'm sure, are perfect and don't have these problems, but I do myself. 

 (Page 5) On one hand, we have to acknowledge them, own them with the power of truth, and on the other hand we have to accept this paradox--which is illustrated in the voice of Caruso. The voice of Caruso can be retrieved from the bad recordings of the time. The voice of Caruso in its pristine glory can be recovered from within the bad recordings. That means the immaculate nature of our being is present within its distortions. That's the only way we can validate ourselves when faced with guilt and our conscience. 

The Divine power is really a celestial power. It's the child in us that is more powerful than the ego. We learn from our children. They learn to tell lies, but at first they don't know how to tell lies. The beauty of children is they have something to teach us: the power of innocence, instead of the power of manipulation and dishonesty. That's the power that heals. 

The healing power starts almost like the embryonic state, the state of the embryo which is not differentiated yet. All the initial forces are there, budding. We have to start there. The kind of power we are using is the kind of power that fashioned this embryo, which is somehow behind the embryo itself--a level of energy which, for the physicists among us, is called the scaler level below the electromagnetic field. 

A lot of experiments with healers have shown that the emanations of the hand produce something like a magnetic field. The curious thing is that it happens at a distance, so it can't be reduced to an electromagnetic field. Of course, for researchers it's very paradoxical. They don't understand how on Earth this power works, but for the Sufis, we're talking about a level of energy that is subliminal to the electromagnetic field. It's energy at its inception, before it emerges as power. The best description of it is the power of the Holy Spirit, and it emerges in the altar. For the Sufis, the body of the human being is the temple, and the heart is the altar. There is a tabernacle behind, or below the altar--the solar plexus--where we are in contact with the void. The void is a fullness but not yet existentiated. Spiritual power emerges as pure spirit before it becomes modified into the electromagnetic field, or any power that we can measure at all. 

That means we need, if we think of ourselves as a temple, to discover the sacred in us. That's the rarest thing in the world, the sacred. People have been talking about all kinds of things--psychology, and resentment, and healing the planet, and so on--but in the depth what we're looking for is the sacred. That's why people go to church, or don't go to church. Curiously enough we are looking for something outside ourselves which is within us. That's the reason for meditation, really turning within and discovering this sacred immaculate place in the depth of our being, out of which new dispensations of life emerge continually, recurrently. 
 (Page 6) 
 Four Healing Energies 

The Sufis recognize four different forces that are combined in healing. One is called Muid. It's a kind of resilience. If we're walking in the forest and move a branch of a tree, it will go back to its initial state unless we've damaged it. The rain forests will grow again. Many species will die, but there will be other species. There is that basic resilience, an ability of nature to self-organize itself, of the body to self-organize itself. 

The electromagnetic field is the template in which the body is configured--the cells of the body. Actually the aura of light is a template in which the electromagnetic field is configured. We can even reach a level of reality beyond light. The light we normally experience is only a sliver of the reality of light. It's only one dimension of light. There are many dimensions of light. Eventually we will learn to heal with light. 

Our immune system represents the resilience of our physical body. If it is impaired, it is somehow linked with our self-image. Cancer is a very clear case where the immune system has collapsed, or isn't effective enough because of a bad transcription from the DNA to the RNA by the enzymes that operate these transcriptions. It's like making a mistake on the typewriter or computer: bad transcription. Somehow it's linked, somehow it's not functioning properly because our whole sense of who we are has somehow been impaired by the grossness of our civilization. It's damaging to our soul. 

I remember Dr. David Bohm saying one day, "Be not surprised at a change of a sense of meaningfulness." All of a sudden we see something we hadn't seen before. All of a sudden the penny drops, and that immediately alters the circuits in our brain. Actually it alters our whole body. Now we're very clear about the mind/body axis, but that's not the only element. 

The second power, Muhyi, is the power that emerges from within recurrently, because the Universe is continually reborn, and we are continually reborn. That means we have to do away with the tarnished, jagged ends of ourselves in order to invite the new. If we keep on identifying with what we always have been, then there is no hope for us. Then we have to give up. That is Fana. 
 (Page 7) 
Once Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan was asked for healing by a very sick mureed. My father came into the room and said, "You asked me to come and heal you. Are you prepared to do what I ask you to do?" The mureed said, "Yes." Pir-o-Murshid said, "Get up and we'll have a walk. I'll come back in ten minutes and we'll have a walk." "Oh but Pir-o-Murshid, I can't walk." " Do what I say!" Sure enough, he was cured. Self-image--mind over body. 

In the case of cancer, there is difficulty in digesting the social environmental circumstances, difficulty in digesting them, bad replication, and resistance to dealing with things because they are just too difficult. 

Stress gives us strength. Overstress is not good but we can push ourselves up to a point. With the power gained by doing that we can push ourselves a little bit further. I'm evidence of that because I'm 81 now. I've pushed myself all my life. Don't overdo it, but up to a certain point, push.

The third force is called Hayy, which is the kind of force that you find everywhere. Like in a big store, there is a lot of energy flying about. That's Hayy. It's everywhere; it's the force that moves the stars, and planets, and galaxies. It's a very tangible force, but we can only take so much. That's why we get so depleted if we stay too long in a store. Just go in quickly and run away. Collect all that energy and we get indigestion. That's Hayy, it works centrifugally and centripedally. 

A prince was condemned by his father for unfounded reasons. He was supposed to be killed, but the policeman couldn't do it. He let the prince go. Finally the prince became a sanyassin, and sat in the garden of the palace. From the moment he sat in the garden, everything started to flourish. The sense that wherever you go things flourish is Hayy. It's the kind of energy we give to people, or to flowers. Watch them flower. Imagine a bud, and the bud opens up and starts unfurling. That is the power that makes the potential of people unfurl in their personality. It's a wonderful power.

The fourth is Quddus, a power that descends like lightening. We have the impression it descends through the top of our head and shatters us totally. It is called the quickening of the Holy Spirit: Quddus--Kadosh in the Hebrew language--Sanctus, a feeling of holiness, other worldliness. This is the challenge: how are we able to maintain that sense of sacredness without becoming an ascetic, right in the middle of the world? How can we do that? That's the challenge of our time. 
 (Page 8) 
 Working With Light 

There are many practices with light. We begin by becoming aware of the radiance around our shoulders and our arms--light. We're used to thinking of our body as bounded by the skin, but if we can feel the area of magnetism, then we feel an area of light. 

The way to be able to muster all the potentials of light in our being is--I know it's rather bold to say this--to recognize the angel in us. Perhaps you might say, "Pir Vilayat, do you still believe in angels?" When I look into the eyes of a child, a baby, I never cease to be absolutely shattered by the beauty of the light coming through the eyes of a child, and I think, "What a pity that people grow up." 

We lose that light. We have to defend ourselves, otherwise people will walk over our dead body--and people are mean. There is a strategy, and we have to survive. We resort to "shoulding" ourselves, trying to find ourselves in our lives, and we lose our light. 

There is a saying of the Sufi Najm ud-din Kubra, "You thought you were the witness, but the real witness is the angel in you." What does it mean? Obviously we think we're the witness. What would be the vision of an angel? How would we look at things if we were an angel instead of a human? 

It could be illustrated by a story I heard once while climbing the Himalayas. We had to go through a jungle, with a lot of dangerous animals. There was a rishi sitting in a state of samadhi in a cave. Fortunately he spoke, whereas most of them don't speak. A man in our party asked him what I would call a stupid question. Most questions are stupid anyway. I could see the rishi trying to descend from his pinnacle of ecstasy--wondering, "How could one think that way?"--trying to get into the perspective of that person. 

That is an illustration of what I mean by, "How would we look at things if we identified with the angel in us instead of the human?" We would certainly be rather wary of dishonesty; we couldn't stand it. I think an angel would find it very difficult to deal with it. The only way we can meet dishonesty is by bringing it into the light. Like the devils in the Night on Bare Mountain of Moussorgski. As soon as the light comes they go and hide. 

I can't say this absolutely, but I see some relationship between illness and a kind of shadow that comes upon us, a spillover from the environment--some kind of deterioration, defilement from the spillover. The power of light will dispel that darkness. 
 (Page 9) 
We can work with physical light, but of course it's not enough just to work with physical light. The body does absorb light and emit light. We can increase the amount of light we absorb and emit by mind over body, by visualization, but that's not enough.

The Sufis speak about the light of Divine intelligence. Consciousness is picking up information, but intelligence is thrusting itself upon things. It's active instead of passive. That's what we learn to do in mediation, but the only way to be able to do it is to downplay our assumption of being the spectator, the witness. The consciousness of the angel is one step toward what is called Divine consciousness. 

Saint Francis said, "I thought I was looking at the world, but in fact the world is looking at me." That's the clue, to be able to think of ourselves as thought of by God instead of thinking, and being known instead of knowing. Finally we get into a totally different vantage point. Saint Francis, walking in the woods, used to get into the consciousness of the trees and also the animals. He imagined how he looked from the point of view of the trees, and how the trees feel. If we are in that state when we are in contact with nature, we get absolutely into the consciousness of all the reality around us, instead of that being the object of our cognizance. The consequence is we find ourselves in a transfigured world. We have the ability to get into a state which is familiar and seems to be different from the ordinary state of consciousness, and that's where creative forces come through. 
 (Page 10) 
 The Cells of Our Bodies 

There are practices that will help us to become more capable of administering healing to those people who are in need of succor. Start by simply thinking of the galaxies and feel how our body is a further extension of the big bang, the star dust, how it keeps on being molded and remolded, and keeps on being further fashioned as our body, and how the tremendous intelligence behind it all has made it possible for our awareness, our consciousness, to emerge. Having this matter of our body as the support system is the first thing. 

We don't think of our body any more as a discrete entity, like a portion of an orange. It is the whole Universe, somehow converged as our body--not only converged, but evolving as our body. It's an extraordinary thought. The evolution of our body--the very cells of our body--is in some way a function of our realization. Our understanding has an impact upon the very cells of our body.

We think of the cells of our body as endowed with some measure of intelligence, perhaps even some kind of emotion, and even some kind of thinking. They connect with each other by coordinating their activities so they cooperate. That cooperation is only possible by the diversification of the genes, those that are active and those that are recessive. 

We establish a connection, like a rider can establish connection with his or her horse--so the horse is able to read his/her mind--or a falconer's connection with a falcon. There is a thought connection. If the cells are aware that we are aware of them, they will connect up with us. We cannot order them about as if we were in a military situation, but our awareness of them is going to confer upon them delight, and the consequence is they will start dividing up. 

Having arisen out of the big bang, and the star dust, and the galaxies, we--each fragment of the totality--are now able to enrich ourselves by the environment. We are enriching ourselves by the physical environment, the psychological environment, just like eating food, and not just at the psychological level, but at the level of pure energy and at the level of light, which is matter. 

As we inhale, to start with, imagine there is a kind of magnetism that moves everything, that is the dynamic force behind everything, that is all life. Consciously draw it into ourselves as a first step. If we do that, we imagine we are other than the environment. 

The second step is to consider ourselves as a vortex, like a whirlpool within a lake. Eventually the whole lake gets whirled into the vortex. In the same way we (Page 11) could say we don't have a boundary. We can't say, "I'm absorbing the environment." That was the first step. In the second step, there is a kind of convergence of the Universe, the cosmos, as me, not into me, but as me. It is converging as me. 

This gives us a different connection, not just with the physical matter of the planet and the cosmos, but with the energy field. We started our life being impressed by our image in a mirror. That gave us a sense of having a boundary, our skin. In order to evolve, we have to overcome--bypass--that image. Instead of thinking of "me connected with the totality," think of ourselves as really incorporating the totality. The word is convergence or confluence.

As we hold our breath, we feel the tingling, certainly the giggling, of the cells of the body. We have the faculty of downplaying the interface with the environment, and highlighting what's happening within. At first we don't quite realize what's happening. We can, however, really switch our attention from our normal interface with the environment. The way to do it is to give vent to our need for freedom. It's a very deep need. We are somehow on the horns of a dilemma between our need for involvement in life, with other people, and our need for freedom. To turn within, we need, at least for the time being, to find in ourselves the need to not depend upon external circumstances, so we can rely upon the power that emerges from within. That's the secret of the dervish, and also the sanyassin, and the Buddhist monk. Independence gives us great power. 

As we turn within, the first thing to do is to try be aware of the giggling of the cells of our body. We're supplying them with a further energy by becoming aware of them. It's just like communicating with our horse, or our dog, or our cat. There is a template which organizes the cells of the body. And that template is our electromagnetic field. Now, instead of identifying with our body, we are a force field, or a life field. Our body is a formation within this field. The field is pulsing as we exhale and inhale, and is intermeshed with the field of the Universe, just like a wave gets so intermeshed with the wave interference pattern that we lose sight of the wave, but it's still there. 

As we exhale, there are again two steps. The first step is to think we are radiating energy from our body, even from the pores of our skin. The second step is to think there is an ebb and flow of energy. Now we are reversing the ebb, and shifting into the flow. We can pass to the next phase, which is working with light, instead of magnetism or the electromagnetic field. 

If we pass on to the light field, we have something more concrete to work with, because the cells of the body are able to absorb light from the environment. We know how we feel when we're sun bathing. We're opening up the pores of our skin. Imagine that indeed the pores of the skin are opening up. They allow light to get absorbed into the cells of the body, and the cells of the body are now exalting because of the fresh dispensation of energy. 
 (Page 12) 
As we hold our breath once more, we're not just experiencing the giggling of the cells; we're experiencing the sparkling of the light of the cells which are exalting in glee, because light is energy. The electrons within the cell have to toe the line; there is a certain constraint upon their freedom. They have to conform to a certain pattern of orbitals, but as soon as they acquire a further dispensation of energy by absorbing more light, they are able to jump their orbital. That's called the dance of the cells. It's the meaning of the dance of Shiva--the dance of the cells. 

If we are feeling sorry for ourselves, it's difficult to acknowledge the joy of our body. Our psyche takes a part in this. I know it's very difficult, but we can be happy and sad at the same time. Just like there can be sun in the sky and rain at the same time. Then we have a rainbow. It's not at the psychological level; it's in our very body--a kind of a tingling. It's more than a tingling. It's a real rejoicing of the cells. The ecstasy of light.

When they have absorbed as much energy as they can within their capacity, they unfortunately fall back to where they were before. Of course this is happening all the time. It's as though we inherited money from our aunt. Then when we came back from our world trip, we had to get back to our job again, but we had a good time. It's like that. 

Whatever little bit of energy remains--like a few foreign coins--is radiated out as light. Therefore as we exhale, be aware of the light we emit. It's not light that we reflect as in a mirror. That light has been processed by the very cells of our body. It's a different kind of light that is radiated. This is something we can enhance--consciously--the radiation of our aura. In Tokyo there is a cell you can sit in. If you are able to radiate enough light, you switch on an electric eye, and the whole thing lights up. You try to radiate as much light as you can so you set the whole system working. 
 (Page 13) 
 Resiliance and the Paradox of Honesty 

Imagine a flower as a bud. As we become more aware of the light that is emitted from our heart center, we can imagine the petals of this bud unfurling and becoming a beautiful flower. This is a practice that can be done with a patient. 

What I do is represent to myself mainly the face of the patient--if I know what the illness is--then the body, in blue, like a blue picture. Then I represent to myself in violet that person as he or she might be if he or she were well. I superimpose those two pictures. Then I try to imagine how the blue image would gradually get transformed in order to conform to the violet. 

In order to be able to do this, we must be able to grasp the countenance of the face. That's what the Sufis call that which transpires behind that which appears. 

Imagine that our face is a mask, and that our personality is a model of a role. It is a role that we're playing in life, that life expects us to play, and that is not us. Now as we turn within, we hold our breath after inhaling and drop the mask, or at least downplay it. We have a kind of inborn intuition of our countenance. The reason why we don't validate that is because we identify so much with the image we see in the mirror--which is the cheapest, most deceiving, and most disappointing of all feedback systems in the world. We are able to question what we see in the mirror, downplay it, disidentify with our physical image altogether. Then all of a sudden it's almost like a projection of a picture of what we really are, the countenance behind that mask. It clicks and we know, "This is me." 

Of course, it's a little bit more complex than that. When we try to espy it a little further, it changes according to our thoughts and our attunement. It is many-faceted and many-tiered. We can see defilement in it, and at the same time our immaculate core. It is like several superimposed images of, for example, a baby and the grown up person. In a hologram, several images are superimposed. These are various perspectives on the same complex reality which is us, or the Universe as us. For our logic, it's very difficult to reconcile the fact that there is defilement, things we don't like in ourselves, and at the same time splendor and purity. We can get used to shifting our perspective. For example, see the image of Christ of Turin. Then look at a painting of Christ. Then toggle the glance from one image to the other. We can do the same thing with ourselves. The important thing is to be able to extrapolate between those two images rather than just toggle. 

If we discover those facets of our image which give us delight, they have a way of taking precedence over the aspects that are defiled. Those aspects that are (Page 14) defiled are due to the spillover of the environment, or perhaps even our ancestry. Even our ancestors have incurred the defilement of the spillover of the environment, the psychological environment. I say it's a spillover, but it does arouse something that is similar in ourselves; otherwise it would not affect us. It is our sense of values that will help us give precedence to those aspects of ourselves that give us delight, that will not just downplay those other aspects, but eventually eradicate them. 

This is precisely what we do with a patient. Instead of thinking of the psychological qualities or defects of the patient, we think of the body configuration. There has been some distortion and some wear and tear. There has been distortion because of extraneous elements like viruses or bacteria. We can see the palace in its ruin. Shams Tabrizi said, "The man of God is palace in a ruin." We can envision Persepolis as a palace while all our eyes can observe is the ruin. This is an extreme of course, but we can do this with a person. We can imagine that person in his/her integrity. Then where there has been some deterioration, it can be restored. To start with, we concentrate on the face of the person, and try to grasp the countenance behind the face. That's where we find a multifaceted image. This is only possible if we are able to question our commonplace logic, and develop the ability to reconcile the irreconcilables. In simplistic language it would mean the person is ill and well at the same time. It's not just that the person is ill. From one point of view that person is ill. From the other point of view integrity is still there. The cut leaf of a plant, photographed by Kirlian photography, is still there. 

This is where faith comes in--not belief, but faith. There is a difference between belief- because it's written in a scripture or somebody tells us--and faith, the ability to conceive of the integrity of a person's body despite proof to the contrary. Many miraculous healings are miracles of faith, because the healer becomes the mirror in which the patient is contemplating him/herself. If we reflect his/her illness, we are going to strengthen him/her in the conviction that he/she is ill. If we contend that he/she is not ill, that wouldn't be truthful. The paradox is that the patient is well and ill at the same time.

We are working with a restorative force, a kind of resilience, or inertia, that restores things to their pristine state if disturbed. It's a force that seems to emerge from below, some kind of grounding, like the roots of a tree, very solid resilience. In fact it counterbalances the effect of change by maintaining some kind of continuity. Otherwise we would be all over the place. We need to have that solid foundation--realizing that somewhere, the leaf of a tree is still there, or the template of that leaf is still there if the tree is still there. If a person's leg has been amputated, s/he still feels the leg. Somewhere within the nervous system the leg is still there. This would be an anticipation of the experience of death. Something of the configuration of the body continues to be while the substance is not there or has become dispersed. 
 (Page 15) 
 Regeneration 

The next force we're going to work with is the power of regeneration. In a sense it's a counterpart of resilience, because regeneration requires a breakdown and a breakthrough. It means change. It's not restoring the body to the way it was before. It's perhaps even turning the tables on the illness, becoming better after the illness than we were before. As you know, the body is breaking down all the time. If it were not so, there could be no evolution. There could never be any change. Everything would be the result of the past. Think, therefore, of the emergence of something new. That is our new person, our new being. If we are attached to our being as it was, then we're stuck. Generally if one doesn't progress, one goes backwards. I call this the self-organizing faculty of the Universe, of the cosmos, to restructure itself. 

If we think of the Buddhist samsaric wheel, we realize that unless we evolve, we are rather like a plant. There is a seed and it unfurls as a plant, and the seed comes, and it recycles itself, and so on. That's a wheel that is turning upon itself. We also have the image of a wheel that is advancing. To advance it needs to break the pattern of recycling, and that requires a vision. Vision means the ability to see how something could be if it would be as it might be. Euler says, "The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past." The future is not there. We create it. That is our victory over our conditioning, our freedom. That represents our ability to overcome to some extent, to quite an extent, the forces of dissolution or disruption or disintegration by imagining how we could be--the power of imagination.

This is one of the practices we do. As we inhale, we do what we've done before: experience the convergence of the force of the Universe as our being, as the force of our being, as the force field of our being. 

As we hold our breath, as early as towards the end of the inhaling, we start concentrating more and more on the solar plexus and imagine it to be like a gate into the unknown, into what is called the void. It's not really the void. It's called the void because it represents a subliminal level of reality that represents potentialities, possibilities that have not yet existentiated themselves--actuated themselves in an existential manner. This is creativity, thinking of the incredible possibilities that our realistic mind considers to be utopian, but the fact is the whole Universe is potentially present within our being. If we can see that, it's not utopian at all. It's very realistic.

For example, we can envision ourselves dancing with joy. "Well, why don't I dance with joy? Well, life is hard. People are mean. I don't feel well," and so on. (Page 16) There is always an excuse. "I could be radiant. Why am I not radiant? Well, because I have a low self-image," and so on. There is always a reason. Those are the potentialities, possibilities. "I could beat my record. Today I could walk one mile but it was strenuous. Tomorrow I'll walk a mile and a half. In the afternoon, I'll walk three miles." We are able to increase our capacity by envisioning ourselves doing it. 

When we exhale we make the transit from the possible into the actual. That's where we need to translate an emotion, or an emotional impulse, or even a thought, into a form. That is creativity. Creativity is the ability to translate an emotional attunement or thought into a form. In this case the form is the form of our body, or the form of the cells of our body, or the configuration of the cells of our body, and the organs of our body. 

Now we're calling upon a kind of inborn faculty we have to rebirth ourselves, or to facilitate the recurring rebirthing of the Universe in ourselves. It is really a matter of capturing the new dispensation as it emerges. It's like looking at the crocuses as they break through the snow, or at the fresh petals of a flower that are not yet unfurled. For them to unfurl, first of all, the jaded petals have to fall apart. Furthermore in this particular case, we have to pay attention to the forthcoming fresh petals in our being. That is how we could be. Those are the fresh petals. We have to give them support. Our faith is the support we give them, our faith in their ability to actuate themselves in our personality, in our body. We must also protect them from the little faith of other people, and from our own tendency to doubt, which is counterproductive. 

We can feel that force coming through as we exhale. If we hold our breath we're in a state of suspense; we don't know what's happening in the deep waters of the seed bed of our being. But now, as we exhale, something new is emerging. It is not the consequence of the past. It challenges determinism and conditioning. It is a feature of our freedom from our conditioning. Just think of a flower unfurling, and of us protecting it and encouraging it. 

Now we concentrate on the solar plexus of our patient, and imagine something is emerging from the depth. It unfurls in the heart center of our patient with a transit from the solar plexus to the heart. Now creativity becomes even more concrete when, having started as an emotional attunement or a thought, it becomes a form, let's say an etheric form without substance--like music as it is being composed, not yet played. It's a form without substance, and eventually it will manifest as a substance that will have an impact in the physical world. We have to make that transit. 

A most pertinent example would be a case of cancer. If we are aware of the cells of our being--we can start very simply--aware of the taste in the mucous of our tongue or palate: salt, or sweet, or succulent. Be aware of wholesome food as (Page 17) against junk food. When we swallow that food--this is something we can do at our leisure--we try to feel the food in our stomach, and feel how our stomach has the same ability as our tongue to sense food. Its ability to absorb food is going to be in some way related with its sensitivity. There is a conflict between that which we like and dislike. There is a clue of cancer, forcing ourselves to imbibe things purely at the physical level, things that are not wholesome. 

Going a little further, we try to feel our pancreas. It's somewhere between the stomach and the spine, a little bit on the left. The pancreas has a terrible job to do, because that's where the enzymes of our body are encountering the food, those chemical chains, the amino acids. Our whole system, including the liver and gall bladder, is having to process that food so the amino acid chains will correspond with the DNA of the body. Just imagine the amount of work that is taking place; at the psychological level we are doing the same thing. We're processing circumstances, and we suffer because they don't correspond to what we wish. Our sense of self-esteem is at stake, so we get over-stressed. We can have indigestion in the body; also we can have indigestion at the level of the psyche, and there is some interference between the two. 

To go further than that, we can feel the drainage system in our body, the lymph glands, not just the evacuation of urine and feces, but the way a lot of toxins are drained. It's just like a bathroom, like a toilet drainage system that eventually gets shunted to your kidneys. Eventually it gets expelled. Now imagine we are cramped and blocking that flow. We can encourage evacuation by visualizing it. It's a flow downwards. There are several ways of doing it, but I suggest imagining an aperture at the top of the crown, and energy flowing downwards. It keeps on pushing down all the toxins. It's a kind of mind over body, our sense of purity, which is linked with the descent of the Holy Spirit, the quickening of the Holy Spirit -- like a dove coming down through the aperture at the top of the head. Now it seems to be pushing the toxins, repelling them downwards. 

As we inhale, we think of the descent of the Holy Spirit. As we hold our breath we are shattered, just like lightening. In some way we are dissolved. It is good to encourage the disintegration of the body. Otherwise we get sclerosed. That's the way illness sets in. Let it flow; it's good to encourage a sense of imagining the cells of our body being scattered in space. It's a sort of prefiguration of death. There is motto of the Sufis, "Die before death and resurrect now." Instead of hanging on to the cells of our body, enjoy their disintegration because now they can be replaced with new ones. The whole drainage system is part of this effect of the disintegration of the body, starting with the toxins. 

I like to do this together with work at the psychological level, to think of thoughts that are not appropriate, like hatred for someone, or jealousy, or even resentment, or any thoughts or emotions connected with the body that are inappropriate. Our sense of self-esteem is somehow based on observing our highest  (Page 18) ideal. This can repel those toxins in our psyche that are detrimental, that tend to draw our attunement downwards instead of allowing us to be inspired and elated. 

We could pursue this further. A radio film produced by the American Cancer Society shows the macrophages attacking the sarcoma cells, and literally absorbing them. We can actually see them do it. If we have a cancer patient, he/she could be taught to visualize the macrophages in the area of the sarcoma. We have to have a very clear picture of how they look and how they function. That's why I think it's really necessary to know these things and to go into them. For example, if we lift our arm, it's because we are able to visualize our arm being lifted. That will release certain chemicals and neurotransmitters in the body. That's mind over body. If we can visualize the macrophages, then we are impacting the body with our thoughts, giving the macrophages support with our thoughts, and perhaps even encouraging their action.

A very good healer can do the same thing with a patient. The healer imagines this whole process happening with the patient. The best thing to do is to invite the patient to meditate on that exactly at the same time the healer is doing it, so they are reinforcing each other. 

There is a deeper perspective: looking at the whole body as a wholistic paradigm, instead of just looking at the detail. That is restructuring the body in line with our highest attunement, which involves our self-esteem and self-image. There are several things we should do leading to that perspective. 

Here we touch upon the very essence of Sufism: always to see things from two complementary vantage points, our personal, and the Divine vantage point. Our own vantage point is only a very limited view, and we do have the ability to look at things from the antipolar point of view. This applies to healing because the idiosyncrasies of our personality have their effect in the template of the body--the electromagnetic field, the aura, and so forth. There are many different factors at work here. In a very high meditation, we can work with the subtle body or the aura. It's easier to work with the aura. The aura has a shape, or rather configuration. It doesn't have a boundary, it doesn't have contours, but it has some kind of an inner structure. The countenance we discovered is a fabric of light. We are able to extend it to our whole body, not just our face. We did make an effort to capture what we really are, in our real being beyond the mask, but that was as seen from a personal vantage point. To do the opposite, to see it from the Divine vantage point, is difficult, but that's what meditation is all about. 
 (Page 19) 
 Resurrection 

We're getting into a very advanced chapter in meditation, which has been developed by the Sufis. I'm trying to avoid just making metaphysical statements. Ibn' Arabi says, "It is God discovering Himself through our discovering of God." That is a metaphysical statement: God discovering Him/Herself in the very form in which He/She manifests Him/Herself to Him/Herself though us. Our representation of that archetype contributes to the image that God has of Him/Herself. That's metaphysics. What is important is to be able to envision the subtle form of our aura as it would be seen from the antipodal point from our own. 

That seems difficult, almost impossible, but in the course of meditation it can be done. There are several methods. For example, as we inhale we pass in review each of our chakras, starting at the bottom chakra, moving up to the second chakra, then the solar plexus and heart chakra, the throat chakra, the physical eyes along with the third eye, and on to above the crown--all in one inhaling. Now we think of ourselves as a pendulum. The bottom of the pendulum is moving in time and space, but the point at which the pendulum is suspended is eternal and unchanged. We are the whole pendulum. 

As we transfer our attention from one chakra to the next, we shift our identity from being an individual, a continuity in change, to the discovery of our deathless state. That is the quintessence of our being. No, it's beyond the quintessence of our being. The quintessence of our being is like perfume. It's the way we continue to live after death, but it's even beyond that. It's the reality of our being, which is deathless and unchanged, and which is contiguous with all other beings, so it's impersonal. It's like a lot of pyramids that all have the same apex. This requires the ability to realize we could exist without a body. As Jalaluddin Rumi says, "I walk without feet, and I fly without wings, and I see without eyes, and I hear without ears." I would add, "I think without a brain." Consider our body as a support system for our self as pure intelligence. 

Then we hold our breath and we are in that samadhi state beyond time and space. As we exhale, we experience the impact of that intelligence upon its support system. It is rather like looking at things from a bird's eye view. Instead of aspiring to ascend upwards, we are looking down from a high pinnacle. As we inhale, we are aspiring high. When we hold our breath, we're in samadhi. When we exhale, that's when we are looking down and impacting our body with the power of the Holy Spirit.

There are two dimensions. One is called the arrow of time, evolution. The other dimension is represented by resurrection. That is like the perfume of the flowers. (Page 20) The flowers have to fall apart so the perfume will carry them further into eternity. It's accepting death as a promise of resurrection. It's the ability of matter to be transformed into spirit. As a matter of fact, electrons can be transformed into photons, and they live into eternity. 

For there to be evolution, there has to be a fast turnover of people. Otherwise things wouldn't change. I don't know why people think death is a bad thing. We have to keep people on the planet at all cost. It's much better to undergo a process of resurrection while one is on the planet. Then death is just a transit. I don't know why we think we need to cure people absolutely, so they can keep on living as long as possible. We have to accept that there is a natural disintegration of the body, but at least take advantage of those fantastic regenerative faculties that we talked about in order to promote resurrection instead of longevity. Sufis have a lot of teaching about that. In practice, if I translate it in terms of science, then the electrons are transformed into photons which is extraordinary. We were born out of an explosion of light, and we end up as beings of light. It's very interesting to see how we can promote that transformation of our magnetic field into an aura, and also the different levels of the aura, of light. That's resurrection, passing from one level of light to the next through what are called the celestial spheres.
 (Page 21) 
 The Depth of Light 

Once more as we inhale, we remember there are two stages of light. At first we thought we were a body that was absorbing light and eventually radiating light. In between, while exhaling, we were radiating light. When we were holding our breath, we were conscious of the effervescence. 

At the second step we identified ourselves with our aura, which was a template in which our electromagnetic field is formed. Then we experienced this pulsing, this ebb and flow of the light of the stars converged as our aura, yet radiating in the Universe. Eventually the photons of our aura hit the stars, because they are traveling at a speed of 186,000 miles a second. That's a good thought--that our aura is really the light of the stars, that there is no discontinuity between them. That's our first vision. Instead of thinking that our body is emerging out of the fabric of the star dust, think that our aura is an integral part of the light of the stars, and that there are several levels of light.

As we inhale, think of the way the light of the stars converges as our aura, but now as we hold our breath, instead of concentrating on, first of all, the giggling of the cells, and then the sparkling of the cells' auras, concentrating on what Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan calls the all-pervading light. The ancient Sufis say the same thing. It's what Dr. David Bohm would call the implicate state of light. Like radio waves, for example; they are spread out in space. They are not located in space. A radiant light is emitted from a radiant source of light that is localized in space, but the all-pervading light is everywhere, what we call a wave interference pattern. That is something we have difficulty imaging. We imagine we are an aura, but if we can think that this all-pervading light is the subliminal state out of which our aura emerges in a definite form, it becomes like working with the energy that emerges from within. Eventually magnetism can be used to heal a patient. The same is true of light. 

Holding our breath, we imagine the seedbed of our aura is an emergent light. It is not localized in space and time, but as it emerges it becomes radiant light. Then as we exhale, we are conscious of radiating light. The important thing is that passage from the emergent light, when we hold our breath, to radiant light. We are transducers of energy, of light energy. We are able to transform this emergent, all-pervading light into radiant light. As we inhale, we could imagine a state of light, where everything is everywhere. Then, as we hold our breath, it begins to impinge upon our consciousness. As we exhale, we are radiating it. We make a transit from our solar plexus to our heart center. The all-pervading light is in the solar plexus. It transforms into radiant light in our heart center. Pir-o-Murshid gives as an example the all-pervading light that becomes radiant light in the sun. We can think of our heart as a small sun, a micro sun.
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We started to explore the levels of light by transferring our attention from one chakra to the next as we inhaled. The first thing to do is to really feel the light. To start with, we feel light around our skin and inside our body. It's not a matter of visualizing or imagining it, but actually feeling it.

If we are aware of our aura, we may distinguish colors. They're not really colors. They are different frequencies of light, but we could--this is mind over body--imagine our aura to be yellow, golden. We could imagine it to be blue, like the sky. There is a totally different emotional attunement corresponding to each color. Yellow is very radiant. Blue is celestial. The color red is active, and could be aggressive. Green is life giving. These are not just ideas; we can literally do this, and our aura will change its color according to our emotional attunement and also our visualization. 

We want to explore the different levels of light. We represent to ourselves our aura as the spectrum, like a rainbow, with red at the bottom and violet at the top. Red is at the bottom of the spine, vermilion in the second chakra, orange in the solar plexus, gold in the heart center, green in the throat center, blue in the eyes, violet in the third eye, and colorless light--like a diamond with flashes all the different colors--in the crown. This has a wonderful effect on our aura. It's just like tuning a harpsichord, and brings us into a state of harmony. Daily practice will find us starting the day with a beautiful sense of orderliness. 

Now we hold our breath, and instead of representing to ourselves physical light, we identify with the light of intelligence, Nur Aqil. The Sufis say it is the light that sees rather than the light that can be seen. It's what the Tibetans call the clear light of bliss. We've reached the pinnacle of our being, which is pure luminous intelligence rather than consciousness. When we say luminous, it's metaphor; we don't mean physical light. 

It's not enough just to visualize this. In fact it can't be done by just trying to imagine it. How can we imagine nonphysical light? The way to do it is to represent to ourselves that we are awakening from our ordinary state of consciousness. It is something like shifting our perspective when looking at a holograph. We downplay one perspective, and highlight another. Now we downplay the perspective of the physical world. The way to do it is to consider that it is a perspective; it's not ultimate reality. It's the way things appear. If we question the absoluteness of our experience of the physical world, then somehow we have a sense of awakening, just like one awakens from sleep. 
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It's also connected with our assessment of our problems. If we question the validity of our assessment, consider that it is relative, we are freed from the gravity pull of our existential perspective. We're letting go of a perspective. It's not letting go of our body; it's actually identifying with the different templates of our body, the different levels, not just the physical body. 

There is a mode of thinking corresponding to our body identity. That's the commonplace way of thinking. As we shift our sense of identity, our mode of thinking changes. For example, we can see things in their context instead their content; we can reconcile the irreconcilables. There are different modes of thinking of the higher mind beyond the commonplace mind. In a sense we are liberated from our commonplace logic. That's the way to awaken, to question our ordinary logic. 

There comes an intensification of our perspicacity. It's like being very aware, highly aware, intensely aware, but not necessarily aware of the physical world. We consider our body, our mind, and our psyche -- as Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says -- a condition of God, like a wave is a condition of the sea. Consider our existence on the planet is like a wave in the sea, a condition of the sea, that is passing. I'm sorry to talk metaphysics, but the knowhow which we have gained by experience is shunted into the programming of the Universe. 

To awaken is parallel to resurrecting--changing our identity and experiencing ourselves--because that which is reprogrammed into the programming is the quintessence of our knowhow. To be part of it, we have to think of ourselves as the perfume of the flower that we are. Think that the jaded petals are going to fall apart, but the perfume is going to live forever. The word is everlastingness. Everlastingness is not eternity. It's not the same thing. If we can do this, we will awaken. We discover that we are pure luminous intelligence. We look at our life and we see that we get caught in a hoax. We are so sure things are the way we think they are, and suddenly we've awakened. We can only awaken if we question our assessment of what we experience. 

The Sufis, and many other esoteric schools, speak about different planes and spheres, and I don't want to go into systems, but how do we experience them? Well, the clue is light. 

There is a practice, given by Buddha himself, called Casina. It parallels some of the practices given by the Sufis. If we were to cut a cardboard into a disc, paint it red, look at it, and then close our eyes, we would see a green reflex. We don't have to do that. We can imagine the color red as we exhale. As we inhale, don't try to imagine green, but I think that a green disc will appear. Next we exhale, imagining red, but then divide the inhaling into two parts. The first we see green, and second we see orange, the reflex of the reflex. Then we can go on. Divide the inhalation in three, adding violet, and so on. Then it goes beyond our sense of colors, but we can go on and just imagine frequencies of light. That's difficult, because our imagination is somehow limited by our perception, but the real practice consists in imagining light, colorless light, as we exhale. As we inhale, imagine the reflex of light without any color. I can't evoke it by talking about perception. It's beyond perception. Then we train ourselves to divide our inhaling in two, imagining the reflex of the reflex, and so on. 
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We begin by imagining light, which would be perceiving, and then we go beyond perception; but we are still imagining an object. Now we want to do the same thing with the subject in us. For that there is no use of my talking about principles. We have to know how to do it. With closed eyelids we represent to ourselves the beams of our glance. Normally we are not aware of the beams of our glance, because our eyes are instruments of perception. The retina, through the cornea, absorbs light, and that light is threaded along the optic nerves into a certain area of the brain. Eventually it infuses the whole brain. Think of this light as being threaded up the optic nerve and reaching right up in our brain as we inhale. As we exhale, the opposite happens, or at least imagine the opposite, that the light in our brain is threaded through the optic nerves and passes through the retina and cornea and reaches out into outer space. 

Normally we're not aware of this light; when the sun is in the sky we can't see the stars. Even though the stars are much brighter, we are not aware of it. If we close our eyes and concentrate upon those two beams, we can become aware of them. With open eyes, we imagine the light of the environment impinging on our retina and reaching up into our brain. Hold the breath, representing to ourselves those two beams of light. While exhaling, try to open the eyes without letting them be forced into focus by the way that objects look. It looks like a blur. Just concentrate very intensely on those two beams of light. 

This practice can take months and months. It can't be held very long. When the eyes start opening we try to keep concentrating on the beams of light. When we start seeing the objects, we close our eyes and start again. Eventually we are able to do this with our eyes open. Then when we look in the direction of a person, we don't see the features of his/her face, but the features of the aura of his/her face. We can do the same thing with a flower. 

In the next step, we introduce a period of retention of the breath between inhaling and exhaling. As we hold our breath, we turn our eyeballs upwards, pressing the tongue against the palate. Now as we hold the breath we represent to ourselves that our aura is just the support system and our real being is pure, luminous intelligence. We make a quantum leap from identifying with our aura to identifying with the light of intelligence. Now as we exhale, we imagine that the light of intelligence is somehow passing through our glance, just the river Rhone passes through the lake of Geneva. That is the way in which, when looking at a person, we don't see just see the countenance behind his/her being, but look right into his/her soul. And that is what Najm ud-din Kubra means by the witness in the heavens. Instead of working with light as the object, now we're working with light as a subject -- Shahid, the witness.
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 Our Identity as Light 

We have more clues about how to identify with the light of intelligence. We 	 have the picture of the pendulum. We think our body is changing and moving in time and space, eventually disintegrating, and being reborn again, recycling. In the samsaric wheel the body recycles itself, and so does the psyche, unless we evolve. To evolve, there has to be an attractor that causes the wheel to advance. I'm sorry, but this is metaphysics. The attractor is not in the future. It's eternal. It's very difficult to understand that. There is an element in our being that is not of the nature of becoming. That's what Buddha means when he says, "This becoming does not lead to the non- become." We need to make a quantum leap from those aspects of ourselves that are subject to becoming, to change, and really find that point in our being that remains unchanged. That is the greatest power there is. That's the power of Quddus, the Holy Spirit. It's not the emergent power that we talked about. It's not Hayy, the energy of the environment. 

To do that we consider our body as a condition of the cosmos, and our mind as a condition of the Divine mind, and our personality as a condition of the Divine nature. It's all moving and hopefully evolving and deteriorating and being reborn again. It's a continuity in change. It's never the same water that passes under the bridge, but it's always the same river. The consequence is we develop a kind of detachment with regard to those things which used to be so important for us. It's all passing. If we see our life from a higher perspective, life on the planet is a very short episode in eternity. One thing we see is how we are caught in a perspective. We are convinced about the ideas we have, and our assessment of our problems, our self-image, and our logic. We become dependent upon our understanding. Ultimately, freedom is freedom from opinion, freedom from dependence, freedom from our self-image, and freedom from our notion of our individuality. These are all formations, and life is our opportunity, yes, to transform circumstances, yes, to unfurl the potentialities of our being, but ultimately, to awaken. That's called a state of illumination, the ultimate value.

This is going to impact our aura and will help us to heal with light. That's the meaning of a light upon a light: the light of intelligence, that acts as a thunderbolt upon the aura and causes it to spark and fluoresce. 

This is what Christ means by being in the world but not of the world. It's not like the ascetic, who is not in the world. We are in the world but not of the world. We are very sensitive to the worldliness, to the games of the egos, to the ploys, to the manipulations, to the machinations, to the hoax that we find all around us, because we are awake. We no longer allow ourselves to be fooled. 
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If the disintegration of the body has lent itself to illumination, then it was worthwhile. That's why Jelaluddin Rumi says, "Take a pick axe and destroy your house and you might find a treasure underneath." I suppose our simplest minds would say, "Supposing I don't find a treasure?" That's a secret treasure. As the Sufis say, "It is the hidden treasure that desired to be known, and which we cannot know but which is revealed to us." 

Now we come across the real crux of Sufism, which is knowing we must open ourselves to knowledge being disclosed to us, instead of thinking we can acquire it. This is where the role of God is absolutely essential. Just imagine He/She is discovering Him/Herself by disclosing Him/Herself to us. That's paradoxical. That's why the Sufis say, "Perplexity, perplexity." The dervish is always perplexed. Pir-o-Murshid says, "God Himself is perplexed." The best thing that can happen is to be perplexed. The consequence is a very deep emotion, the emotion of perplexity, because all those crutches we depend upon in our logical thinking, of which we are so convinced, fall apart. 
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 Dhikr 

The staple food of the Sufis is the practice of the Dhikr. There are many ways of thinking of it and doing it. We could just make a circle with our head, the samsaric wheel actually. Turn the head toward the left shoulder and the left knee, right knee, right shoulder and then right up to the zenith, three quarters of a circle. Then continue. Imagine a wheel. Think of the whirling of the galaxies, and the planets, and of course the dervish whirling. That's the samsaric wheel.

There are two forces generated in the wheel: centripetal and centrifugal. In the centrifugal we can experience the dispersal of our being into the starry sky. That's the experience of death, disintegration--as the condition for rebirth of course. We also feel a centripetal force, something that keeps on drawing us toward our solar plexus. Our solar plexus--the center of the vortex of our magnetic field and our aura--is a void. The center of a whirlwind is a vacuum. Somehow we are being dispersed at the jagged ends. As we exhale, we're going into the circle. When our head turns up towards the zenith, we can feel that pull of the solar plexus, the centripetal force. At that time we are in the most vulnerable state, the Sufis call it the kemal state, so we let our head bow towards the solar plexus.

It's three quarters of a circle, and then the vertical line. We represent these two principles in life, the recycling, and then the tangent that frees us from the vicious circle. When the head comes down, we inhale, hit the solar plexus, and then rebound, continuing to inhale as our head rebounds upwards. Now think of the circle as a circle of light, and then an arrow of light descends upon the solar plexus, and, when it rebounds, the heart center starts exploding; the light sparkles radiating from the heart center. Keep on moving up because the higher chakras are radiating a more subtle light than the heart center. 

Our attention is drawn to the heart center as we move from the solar plexus to the crown center, and we transfer our attention from one chakra to the next. The time we are concentrating on the heart center is the time when, if we are a healer, we radiate, we send we broadcast light to our patients from our heart center. It's only if we really love our patients that we can do it. If, however difficult they are, we still love them, our heart opens up and we can radiate light into the heart of the patient. We think of the heart of the patient at that moment. It's very short, because after that our head is farther up as we continue to inhale.

Remember, instead of a circle, it is a spiral of light which reaches further and further, and than we hit the center of that spiral, the solar plexus, then the heart. Actually it's a little more complicated, because the solar plexus really does represent the center of the electromagnetic field, and the heart the center of the aura of light. There we have the transit from magnetism to (Page 28) light, from the solar plexus to the heart. 

I tried to illustrate resurrection by the reflex of one light, then another light. That's what we do after concentrating on the heart center, then as our head moves upward, we think of different reflexes of colorless light. The clue is this: at a certain point, we have to overcome any sense of form. (This is in the teaching of Ibn' Arabi, and Jami says the same thing.) That means any sense of color or any sense of physical light. This gives us access to the higher spheres--no more imagination; no more images; therefore nothing that has any relevance to physical reality.

At the end of the ascent, having inhaled as the head comes down and reaches up again, we hold our breath. We turn the eyeballs upwards and curl the tongue. Remember what we said about the light of pure intelligence. At that point we have reached beyond the wheel. The wheel recycles itself, evolves; that's everlastingness. Eternity is beyond; it's outside the wheel. That's what Buddha means by saying that the process of becoming does not lead to eternity. Eternity is another dimension altogether, a state of samadhi. 

The words of the Dhikr are La ilaha illa 'llah hu. In Arabic the 'a' is a vertical line and 'l' is the arc of a circle. 'H' represents a totally different dimension at the end of the word 'llah. That's a state of samadhi, but the purpose of the Sufis is not samadhi. It's not awakening beyond life; it's awakening in life. Awakening beyond life is for the ascetics in the Himalayas, but the dervish is right there in the marketplace, not in a cave. He or she is there for you. That's awakening in life. 

What could that mean, when the 'h' is followed by a 'u,' La ilaha illa 'llah hu? Touch upon the 'h' for just a split second, a sliver of a second. Then our head turns toward our physical heart, not the heart center, but the physical heart. I've pondered upon why the physical heart instead of the anahata chakra. The reason is because that is where the impulse of the new circulation of the blood starts, just like in a locomotive, the point at which the piston communicates its energy to the wheel is not at the center of the wheel but offset from the center of the wheel. That's life.
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Awakening in life is something like having been privy to the Divine strategy. Understanding the Divine intention, which our minds can never grasp, somehow sets up the Divine intention. Then seeing it work in life is like having visited a beautiful building, and then visiting the architect, and then visiting the building again, accompanied by the architect. Now we understand what it's all about. That's awakening in life. 

When we awaken in life, of course we would like to heal people, but we need to ask, what is the intention in this health situation? Is there something that went wrong or is there some intention so that eventually the body needs to be disintegrated? The only positive thing we find in the disintegration of the body is if it is transformed into light, and if our understanding is transfigured into realization. That's the only thing that makes sense. We look at our life and think, "What am I doing with my life? How can I help people?" We have our concepts of what we think is best for people, but we must not think that what we think is best for people is the best for them. 

The healing of the spirit is more important than the healing of the body. That's why people suffer, despair. What the Sufis say is that we communicate with the Divine ecstasy through our being. It helps a person to acknowledge the need for the disintegration of the body. It's not just the disintegration, but the transmutation of the body into light, ultimately not just physical light, but the light of pure intelligence.

Part Two:  The Foundation
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 Our Path in the World 

We start by taking an overview of our lives: what we're doing, what our motivations are. It's very important at times to call a halt from the humdrum routine of everyday life and ask ourselves these pertinent questions. What is it that I wish to do in my life? What are the values that I hold above all others? We have involved ourselves in life by taking decisions that have consequences. It's not always easy to change tack. However, there is a time when we need to make a survey, and have the courage to ask ourselves these questions. What are those things that I consider of the utmost importance? Does what I'm doing in my life actuate that which I value? Are there things in my life that go counter to my fulfilling those motivations? Then we ask, what are the positive steps I would need to take in order to make my life fulfill those objectives? They must be realistic objectives; rather than paying lip service to ideals which are not realistic. That's why Pir-o-Murshid says, "Shatter your ideals on the rock of truth."

Life is the whole Universe trying to come through each one of us, so some of its bounty and splendor can become actuated in our personality. Pir-o-Murshid says the personality is the fruit in the tree of life. That seems to be an objective. 

I look at people. At my age of course, I've known people for a long time. I've seen some people evolve and become wonderful beings. Other people seem to have deteriorated. I think the reason is there is a spillover from the environment. I don't think that spillover could have an effect upon us unless we have in ourselves a kind of resonance with that which we are taking on from the environment. The challenge of life is hard. It's very difficult to reconcile our ideals of--I'm using the language of the Sufis now--beauty with majesty. Those are the two aspects. 

In my meditations particularly, but in real life also, I'm always on the lookout for the sublime manifesting as beauty. I see it in the countenance of people. Not in the face, but in the countenance. I also see hatred sometimes, bitterness, disenchantment, aggressivity. Those kind of things stand in the way of our evolution, and certainly stand in the way of the ideal I see in life, which is that the sublime nature we ascribe to God should manifest as a reality in the human being. That's why Pir-o-Murshid says, "Make God a reality." So it's not in the mind. It's something very tangible, even right into the very form of our subtle body. That as tangible as we can get. One of the things we work with is the confection, or the fashioning, of the subtle body. 

Another thing I see, particularly after all these years, is a yearning to make sense of life--we could say 'to know,' but it's not as simple as that. We can't make (Page 32) sense of life, and our ordinary commonplace thinking will never make sense of life. In fact, the more we try, the more perplexed we are. Our commonplace minds are totally inadequate to understand the meaningfulness. We need to work with our thinking, our opinion. We need to transform it, to discover new modes of thinking.

This is called illumination, but I'm very wary of words. I want to see how it works, what it does to people. I don't think we can ever say we have attained illumination. There are flashes. We all have those flashes. All of a sudden the penny drops, and we can see something we hadn't seen before. We want to study how we can foster those flashes of realization so they can transform our being. 

We have a need to achieve something in life. We give priority to that which is urgent rather than that which is important. Shahabuddin Suhrawardi said, "The support system takes over." We have a very efficient base camp for climbing to the top of the mountain, but we put so much energy into the underpinnings we need in order to survive that there is no energy, and no time--and perhaps no impulse, or the impulse is not strong enough--to reach the top, which is what it was all about. 

What Buddha means by the samsaric wheel is a tendency of life to be repetitive, to recycle itself--like the seed, and then the plant, then the flowers and then the seed again. It recycles itself. That's the samsaric wheel. The wheel turns around its axis. 

The next step would be evolution. The wheel is advancing. Unless we advance, we go back. I don't think we can really stay still. We get sclerosed. In any case it's counterproductive. Life doesn't seem to make sense if we just stay the way we are. Our self-esteem is also at stake; it plays a very important part in making sense of our lives, and in our achievements. 

We are all part of a gigantic effort to build a wonderful world. We are making life more comfortable and we are making a better underpinning for the evolution of consciousness on the planet. The stardust that fashioned itself into us humans has become more and more a wonderful underpinning for the awakening of consciousness. That's what's happening. It is a pity if catering to the underpinning deters us from awakening, because awakening is what it's all about. 

I think that to progress, we have to be of service. There are two ways of looking at life. One is the way of the world, wherein we say, "Well I want to earn a lot of money. I want to have comfort. I want to enjoy myself." The consequence is we do not mind stepping on the corns of other people and pushing other people aside. I see that kind of selfishness--I'm talking about something very tangible--in the countenance of people. I can see gross selfishness. I'm sorry to use that word, but that's what I see. I see other beings who are what I call heroes or heroines. (Page 33) They have no pretense of spirituality--firefighters, doctors, teachers--wonderful people who have made up their minds at some point in their life, probably at an early age, that they want to serve. They are conscious of the sufferings of people. 

We can serve by building a beautiful world. The trouble is, in the course of building our material world, we are tempted to pursue our personal greed, instead of need. Where does need become greed? That is a very difficult point. It's different for each person. We have to know exactly where that is in us. 

We have to choose if we want to be in the world and of the world, or in the world and not of the world? Those are the words of Christ. They do not mean we have to leave the world to become an ascetic. Perhaps that is the challenge of our time. I have met such wonderful beings in the caves of the Himalayas, and amongst dervishes, and amongst the Catholic monks, and orthodox monks in Mount Athos, and sometimes amongst the Hassidim. It is much easier to follow the ideal of spirituality, easier to be in ecstasy. Emotion is very important. It's easier to be in ecstasy when we don't have to deal with the egos of people. Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan said, "We are tested in our love." That means we are tested in our ability to love people who make themselves difficult to love. I didn't use the word obnoxious, but I could have. It's very hard. It seems that stress is written right into life in order to make us be able to evolve. 
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To advance, the wheel needs to be pulled forth by an attractor. It was Euler, the wonderful physicist and mathematician, who said, "The pull of the future is stronger than the push of the past." It's rather paradoxical because the future is not there. We have to create the future. Somehow, in our thinking, we have to realize the programming of the Universe is delegated into our hands. Now that's a Sufi view, at least a more progressive view, not always to be found in all Sufis. 

The Sufi view is we are continually, recurrently reborn. If we were not continually reborn, we would be conditioned by the past. There is a possibility of renewal, of something new that emerges, and is not the consequence of the past. It's very important, especially when we suffer from our guilt, to realize that although we can't totally reverse what we did, we can invite a new dispensation in our being. 

Now there's one more factor that is very difficult to understand: a vertical one instead of a horizontal one. The wheel advances horizontally into the future, but the attractor is not in the future. It is transcendent. It's a different level altogether. That's why Buddha says, "This becoming does not lead to the non-become." The only way in which this attractor, if I may call it so, can have impact on our being, is if we are able to reverse our consciousness and try to look at things from the antipolar point of view to our own, which is what the Sufis call the Divine point of view. Without the notion of God I don't see how it can be done. 

We must be very careful about what we imagine God to be. We project an image of what we would like God to be like, and we confuse that with that reality which can never conform to our projections, still, there is some beauty in that, and some value in it. It starts simply by bewonderment--bewondering. Scientists are now using the word elegance, saying the Universe is not just super-intelligent, but elegant. The sense of bewondering--the wonder of life, the miracle of life--leads beyond bewondering toward something we call glorification, which is the religious emotion. 

In order to glorify, we project upon God those qualities that are latent within ourselves, or have unfolded to some extent in our personality. By doing so, we arouse those qualities in ourselves. Also we perfect those qualities in ourselves. Therefore, for the Sufis, glorification is the most creative of all acts. In fact, it is the creative act par excellence. 
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 Meditation 

In our meditation, prayer is always going to be the most powerful impulse in everything we do. We must be very careful when meditating not to just think in terms of "I want to be better, I want to improve, I want to change." That is limiting our experience by our identity. It's our identity that stands in the way of our experiencing in meditation. Meditation, I would say, is essentially a transformation of our sense of identity. 

Consider that our meditations are a rehearsal for life, rather than a retreat from life. Consider that in our commonplace way of going about life, we are reacting to the challenge of circumstances rather than acting. As the world comes upon us we learn to say, "I can't play ball with you because I want to first consult my deeper self." That's what meditation is all about. 

We place a buffer between the challenge of the world and our inner self so we're able to muster the potentialities in our being, rather than just proceed by what is called the strategy of the ego, which is reactive. We're used to reacting; in fact, that strategy represents a kind of defense. Normally we don't know any other mode of defense, so we count upon this to protect ourselves when we are abused or humiliated. That's what wars are about. 

We need to wean ourselves from that strategy gradually. If we don't wean ourselves, we are going to have psychological withdrawal symptoms. We'll feel sorry for ourselves because we've become weak, instead of strong, and we don't know how to deal with the challenge of the world. 

When we begin to meditate, all kind of random thoughts are going to impinge on our consciousness in a disorderly way. We think, "I can't meditate. I can't control these thoughts." What we are doing is beginning to be aware of the process of digestion in our psyche, in which we are digesting the occurrences, the situations in the environment. 

There is an osmosis between the environment and our psyche. We are so used to thinking of that which is experienced as the object, and ourselves as the subject, that when we start meditating, we have to begin to realize the world we think is outside--circumstances which could be quite traumatic--has been imbibed by our own being, our own psyche. There is an osmosis. 

We are interpreting events, assessing situations, in order to decide what we are going to do. Consequently we are imbibing in ourselves, ingesting in ourselves, a distorted view of the situations. We have a biased view of situations because we are looking at them from a personal point of view, which is only one point of view. 
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The first thing to do when we meditate, is try and see the problem, or problems, from the point of view of ourselves, and the point of view of another person, then more people, who are involved in the problem. That's one way of eschewing looking at things from a personal vantage point. If you look at Notre Dame from one vantage point, you haven't seen Notre Dame.

Think of a difficult problem, a personal problem where there is difficulty with another person, and try to get into the skin of that other person. Try to see what it feels like to be that other person. Of course, we tend to be judgmental if we are looking at another person from our own point of view, but when we start looking from his/her point of view, we can see his/her motivations. Perhaps we can see how his/her mind is deceiving him/her. We have to be very truthful to avoid the distortion of a justification. That is the first step. 

The next step is to include more people who are involved in the problem. Our vantage point is only one vantage point. Now we are looking at the problem from several vantage points at the same time. It's not necessarily true that ours is right and the others' are wrong, or that the others' are right and ours wrong. Something is gained by that expansion of our consciousness into what we consider to be the consciousness of other people.

There is a further step. Start again with one person. We try to see ourselves through the eyes of that person, so we can see the way that person sees us. His/her perspective on us is quite different from our self-image. It's not necessarily true that our self-image is right. In fact, it's one of the most deceptive aspects of our thinking, of our identity. It's not necessarily true that others' perspective of us is better than ours, but in any case we are certainly enriching our perspective. We are better able to understand why s/he is doing what s/he is doing. We can see his/her action is based upon a false assessment of our being. I think that helps one to some extent. I don't say it's a solution, but it does help us to deal with resentment. As Christ said, "They know not what they do." 

The next step is to expand the object of our consciousness, to include more and more beings. Walking in nature, in the forest for example, we become aware of nature not as the objects of our cognizance, but as really living beings who are also involved in some kind of consciousness. We suddenly find ourselves in a transfigured world. 

It's like looking at a holograph. We shift our glance, or the perspective of our glance, and all of a sudden we see the same thing, but in another perspective. It's the same forest but it's an alternate perspective, because we are seeing it from the point of view of the trees instead of just from our limited vantage point. The emotion is a wonderful sense of resonance with--kinship really--with all created things. As Saint Francis said said, "I thought I was looking at the world, but the world was looking at me."
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When we start meditating, we think we are the observer, or the spectator of the knowing subject. Our problems, or our thoughts, or our memory of the physical world are the objects of our cognizance. Now we've reversed that. In fact, the whole Universe is looking at itself through our eyes. 

We can do the same thing talking with another person. While we are paying attention to what they are saying, and what we are saying, we can still communicate with him/her at a deep soul level. What s/he is saying is very inadequate in comparison with what s/he implies behind what s/he says, and the same with what we say, what we imply behind what we say. 

If meditation is a rehearsal for life, think of a person with whom we've had difficulty communicating. Maybe there is a way of obviating the obvious by communicating with him/her at a deeper level. In any case, there is no way in which we can explain what we imply, and it's the same for that person.

The next phase is called turning within. This is the quantum leap; it is the point at which our meditation really starts. If we are limiting ourselves to the input of the environment, we're not validating the impact of our being upon the environment. Consequently we are determined, we are conditioned. We're trying to interpret what is happening with a very inadequate mind or mode of thinking. 

The same thing happens with our food. In order to digest our food, we produce enzymes. The enzymes are going to act on the food--proteins, and fats, and hydrocarbons--in order to transform them into amino acid chains that we can incorporate in ourselves. There is an action of us upon the environment, or the way the environment has been ingested. This is the key to unfurling the potentialities of our being. Therefore, it is important in terms of our self-esteem. 

I find the way to do this is to downplay thoughts regarding the environment--the physical environment, or the social environment, or the psychological environment, even the emotion of the psychological environment. In fact, emotion plays a very important part here. Downplay that impact; don't eradicate it altogether, simply downplay it. It's just like a holograph, we downplay one perspective in order to highlight another. Of course we can't do it with our will. We need a kind of imperviousness that safeguards the integrity of our being from being caught up in the hoax of the way things appear. 

We are pulled two directions. On one hand we need to involve ourselves with people, with the circumstances of life, with what has been achieved by our civilization, to participate in these great achievements. On the other hand we realize our involvement is always at the cost of our freedom. 

We think it is circumstance that curtails our freedom. In fact we can be free in our opinion, and in our emotion, and in our identity, while being extremely constrained (Page 38) by circumstances. The vagabond is not necessarily free. We need to find our freedom, first of all with regard to opinion. We realize our opinion is not absolute; it is relative. I don't say it's not valid. It's relative. Then we find some kind of freedom from our obstinacy. We question our opinion. That helps us downplay the impact of the memory of the environment. 

We feel a kind of emotion--we can't do this with our will--the emotion of peace rather than joy, what it feels like to find ourselves at peace with ourselves, and with people, and with life. It is really independence, and we know how dependent we have become in the world. That's why a sannyasin, or a dervish, finds freedom more easily, because he or she is much less dependent upon those things that we, in our civilizations, are dependent upon: our comfort, our facilities. Life has become much more comfortable for us than for people living in the caves in the Himalayas. 

Dependence can lead to addiction, which is much more serious than dependence, not necessarily addiction to drugs, but all kind of things: TV, chatting, being loved instead of loving--a lot of addictions. There is no doubt those addictions impair our self-esteem. The reason for the extraordinary power of those sannyasins and rishis, the reason for their power, is they have found freedom from dependence upon anything. In the dervishes it's the Divine power. I've found greater power amongst the dervishes than amongst the rishis in the Himalayas, because of the sense of the Divine investiture in their being, the majesty of the Divine being they've inherited, that we've all inherited. 

It would be counterproductive to leave the world and seek our freedom. The challenge is to find freedom within these constraining circumstances. It's a question of how we feel. Do we feel absolutely dependent upon circumstances, or do we feel they are conveniences enabling us to fulfill our service in life? They are not the end we pursue in our motivation. That is what Christ means by being in the world but not of the world. 

When the sun is in the sky, we can't see the stars. In fact, there is a practice that is to keep on trying to see the stars as long as possible after the sun rises. We can increase our capacity for doing that. The stars are much brighter, but further away than the sun. If we are aware of the physical world, it is very difficult to be aware of that which is transpiring behind that which appears, a deeper reality. 

For example, there is a countenance behind our face -- the configuration of our subtle body or of the aura behind the physical body, because the aura and the electromagnetic field are the template in which our body is fashioned, configured. So it's a deeper reality. It's a subtle reality because it does not have contour. It doesn't have a profile. 
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As we turn within, we discover a very different world. It's not made of objects that are discrete entities, that have frontiers or boundaries. Everything is intermeshed. If we throw sand on the surface of a lake, we produce eddies. If there are a lot of eddies, we lose sight of the eddies, and all we see is what is called a wave interference pattern. The waves are still there. As we turn within, we might think we are being resorbed in the void, and have lost our sense of personal identity. We have to be very wary of doing that. We have to adapt our thinking to outer experience -- in our minds -- so we'll be able to reconcile the fact that our identity is both personal and impersonal at the same time. It's difficult to reconcile the irreconcilables. The best example is the wave in the wave interference pattern. It's still there, but we can see it in its context. Our being is part of the totality. It's not just a fraction of the totality because the totality is potentially within it. As we turn within we are plunging into the world of potentialities. Sufis call it imkan, potentialities, the potentialities of the Universe as us that are lying in wait and are really calling to be actuated in existence. 

We can get indigestion of course. We can't assimilate all those things; it's challenging. In order to meet that challenge, we need to call upon our potentials. We can really feel what the Sufis call Ishq Allah, the nostalgia of God, as a potentiality of our being. God is a virtuality, at least that aspect of God which is a virtuality, that is a secret treasure, according to the Sufis, which is longing to be known. To be known, it has to manifest as our being. We have to know it by manifesting it. We can't know it before we manifest it. It's like a sculptor who is able to manifest his/her statue by making it. 
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 Recurrent Rebirth 

When we're meditating, we start by trying to extend our understanding of what's happening in the world and what it's doing to us. The next step, which is absolutely essential, is giving vent to the recurrent birthing in our being, which requires our attention. It's like fresh petals in the center of a flower. For one thing, the jaded petals have to fall apart. That is detachment, indifference. It's not just detachment--independence from circumstances--but independence with regard to those aspects of ourselves that we consider to be ourselves, and which we validate, those aspects of our self that we esteem, because they get sclerosed: our vanity, counting upon our charm. It's like something has emerged at some point in our being that has become jaded. It has to fall apart so a new dispensation can emerge from within. It's just like having to protect a little sapling. We have to protect this new dispensation, something in our being that is emerging now. 

We can sense a quality, or just highlight a particular quality that is emerging at this time. Many qualities are emerging, but one is particularly pertinent at this particular moment in each of our lives. It could be amongst many different things. It could be a need for truthfulness. It could be a need for mastery. It could be a need for joy. It could be a need for compassion. It could be a need for love. It could be a need for understanding. So there are many qualities already in us, and they are continually being renewed and highlighted, enhanced. It's like the blossoms on a tree. It can't all happen at the same time.

These are the sifat, qualities, the Divine names we call the wazaif. Wazifa means repeating, or recollection, or confirmation--a process. We cannot force ourselves to develop a quality by thinking, "I need to have this quality. I need to have more power. I need to have more love, or I need to have more compassion," or "I need to have more joy." No, the Universe self-organizes itself in us. We do have a part to play, it's true, in customizing that universal, cosmic self-organization. That's the beauty of the fact that each one of us is different. There is a lot of diversity. Each one of us is unique, but we are unfurling. 

Our qualities can unfurl. They don't always unfurl. It depends upon our concentration, the kind of empowerment we give this quality to actuate itself in our personality. It's nurturing a sapling--not just protecting it, but nurturing it with our attention. Every day we concentrate on that quality, and we think, "Yes I do have this quality, but now it is being refurbished and renewed and enhanced." There is a new dispensation. This quality may have become faded. This is a mixed metaphor, like the shadow. Joy has become facetiousness, or peacefulness has become laziness. That's the way a quality can deteriorate, and become its (Page 41) shadow. It's good then to be able to drink at the source of the new dispensations of life--freshness and purity and vitality. 

What is more, a quality has an emotion. Our concept of a quality is very inadequate. That's why the translations of the names of God are totally inadequate. What is the emotion of mastery? What is the emotion of truthfulness? What is the emotion of love, unconditional love? What is the emotion of compassion? What is the emotion of peace? I know we want to have all of these, but it's better to work with one at a time, maybe two. For example, compassion with firmness so our compassion is not taken advantage of by people who abuse us; joy with mastery so it doesn't rush all over the place, go off the rails, and peace, not as withdrawal from life, but peace as a source of action or as a catalyst of action. 

I've been talking about different qualities. People have different problems and different needs. These are just a few of the qualities we might evoke. Divine majesty. Pure spirit. Life. There are so many qualities. Rather than imposing qualities on ourselves, thinking, "I must develop these qualities"--'shoulding' ourselves--just try to feel the whole of life. There is a kind of synchronicity that happens. The whole of life is pointing towards a quality, trying to draw our attention to the quality emerging at this moment in our nature. Eventually we are able to bridge the gap between the situations in the world and our personality. We are able to see the impact of our personality upon circumstances. Otherwise we just see the impact of circumstances upon our personality. This is creativity. 

Creativity starts with an emotion. We cannot just sit there and make a statue, or painting, or whatever. There is an emotion that manifests and gets shunted into a form, fashioned into a form. At first don't think of the quality as we conceive of a quality. Just think of the emotion, the emotion of Divine power, majesty, peace--all those qualities--and we develop a kind of sensitivity about the quality of our emotion. 

There is a difference between the emotion of the heart and the emotion of the soul. The emotion of the heart is, of course personal, and very important. In the music of Brahms for example, we feel the emotion of the heart. Emotion of the soul is felt in Bach, and in Beethoven sometimes. The emotion of the soul can come through in our personal emotion. My impression is the emotion of the heart is not like the emotion of the body. Personal love -- loving and being loved -- can develop into compassion. Compassion can be sentimental. We aren't necessarily helping people. We have to know how to help them help themselves. There is a deeper impulse than the emotion of the heart. In fact the emotion of the soul is what the Sufis call Divine emotion. That's what we felt, and some of us feel still in the being of Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan, the emotion of the soul rather than the emotion of the heart.
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As we exhale, our consciousness and our sense of identity tend to expand. We are aware of our magnetic field and our aura as we identify with them. There is a spillover from our being into the environment. Then when we inhale -- I'm stepping right back to where we were -- we experience the way the Universe crowds into us, gets converged as us rather than into us. Then in a further step, while we expand, the jaded petals of the flower begin to fall apart. So there is a sense of fana, of extinction in this expansion, dissolution, dissolving, as in alchemy for example. 

There is a danger that we may enjoy losing ourselves. Psychologists are very aware of it, because they are trying to build a sense of who we are. That is why some practices of the spiritual schools seem to go counter to what is sought after by psychotherapists. Instead of expanding and losing ourselves--of course we have to accept that we need to lose those jaded petals--rather than just losing our identity completely and merging with the totality, the wave is present within the wave interference pattern. Murshid introduces the idea of a sense of the outreach of our being. Instead of losing ourselves, we find the outreach of our being, our realm, our domain. The greater the being, the greater his/her outreach. That's our responsibility, our domain. That certainly has the effect of enlarging, expanding our being instead of losing our being. It's both at the same time. As we turn within, we have both things happening at the same time. We do tend to be resorbed in the void in the center. We lose ourselves, we disintegrate ourselves at the jagged ends, and we get resorbed in the void. For there to be a new dispensation, there has to be recurrent rebirthing. That's one of the principles of Islam. That is a reason for fana, for the extinction of a formation: so a new formation can take place. You see the parallel with Buddhism there; the formations are continually replaced with new formations, otherwise we get sclerosed. 

It's a certain quality that Pir-o-Murshid outlines and draws our attention to. For example, the sea has the ability to absorb our pollution up to a point. That's a sense of the void. It is rather different from the disintegration at the jagged ends. What we discover as we let ourselves be resorbed in what the Sufis call ama -- which is not a vacuum exactly, but a fullness, a potentiality -- is the immaculate core of our being which cannot be defiled by whatever we do, by our guilt, or by the impressions of the world. 

It's very difficult to accept that we are defiled, and at the same time absolutely immaculate. It's very difficult for the mind. That's why meditation requires us to operate differently, to think differently from our commonplace thinking. I illustrate this by the voice of Caruso, that can be retrieved now from the bad recordings that were made. The voice is present within its distortion. Our purity too, is present within its distortion. That's also something difficult for our minds to understand, but here we have the proof. We have a demonstration of it. That is the child within. The particular characteristic of that child is innocence, something (Page 43) we tend to lose. I see the beautiful light in the eyes of babies. Then I see people becoming hardened, and the shadow of the Earth upon them; they become gross, and selfish, and aggressive, and cantankerous. What a pity! The child is still there but has been buried. 

When we turn within, it's almost like reversing our whole growth and returning to the origin. In the book called The Inner Life, Pir-o-Murshid mentions the return to that original state of purity, the undifferentiated state, before there has been differentiation into the different qualities. Just the pure reality, the basic reality of our being, that is open, that is innocent. The virgin. The CD plate that hasn't been recorded on yet. So it's like starting from scratch, because we cannot build on something that is crumbling. We have to get back to the roots again and start from there. The access to this purity is absolute truthfulness, absolute authenticity. Angels have no discrimination, and are likely to fall victim to those who manipulate them. That's not a desirable state in the world. If we can keep innocence in the depth of our being, our creativity will start from there. 

We see how our creativity starts as an emotional attunement, and then reaches into our thinking. For example, all musical compositions start with an emotion. If we study the preludes of Chopin, we find they are extremely intelligent. The mind plays a very important part in trying to actuate that impulse at the source of its inspiration. Emotion and thinking are fashioned into a shape. A composition is a shape. It really is a language which communicates an emotion to other people. It's like words, but it's better than words. 

We want to work with how we translate an emotion into a shape. At first it is the shape of our subtle body and our aura. Eventually it can at least manifest in our countenance--not necessarily in our face, because we have inherited a lot of things from our ancestors and so on. We can't rely upon the outer aspect of things. It's what comes through--what transpires behind what appears, rather than what appears--that is important.
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 Light 

The initial emotion, the impulse of creativity, is followed by a very clear understanding. Therefore the mind has to adapt itself to the new vision, and then translate it into shape. The electromagnetic field and the aura is the template in which the body has been configured. I'm saying that not just as an idea. At least for the electromagnetic field it can be demonstrated in laboratory experiments. I find it more useful, easier, to work with the aura, with light, rather than with the magnetic field. In healing we're working with magnetism. I like to work with the aura.

We are a mind and body, consciousness, personality, psyche. That is our personal identity. Inasmuch as we identify with our physical body, we can be aware of the fact that the cells of our body absorb light from the environment. This has been observed in laboratory experiments, so it's not just my idea. It is a matter instead of envisioning light, literally feeling light. I can't say it any differently. 

We might start by seeing if we can feel magnetism around our shoulders and our arms and our chest. We can feel, emanating from the palms of our hands, something that is beyond our skin -- a kind of force, or power, or field. The fact is that by being aware of it, we strengthen it. That's mind over body. That's the secret of healers. 

We can feel light all around us and above our head, like a mantle of light. It doesn't have a contour, a profile, so it's not quite like a mantle of light, but it's the same idea, being enshrouded with light. We feel the way we do when sun bathing, quite unconsciously opening up the pores of our skin to receive the rays of the sun, but without being in the sun. Even in the shade the body has the ability to absorb the light of the environment. The molecules in the cells of the body, the atoms in the molecules, the electrons in the atoms, absorb light and are transformed by light. The electrons begin to spin beyond their orbitals and find another orbital. That is a further dimension of freedom. Light is energy, and it gives them a further dimension of freedom. Eventually the electrons can even free themselves totally from their orbitals and they become what are called free electrons. That's what happens to our body cells. 

We can make a conscious effort to absorb light, even--just imagine--through our skin as we inhale. As we hold our breath, we try to feel the giggling of the cells. At first it is difficult. We have to accustom ourselves to be aware of the miracle of our body. For example, we're aware of our fingers and our tongue maybe. Are we aware of our stomach? Are we aware of our lungs? Are we aware of our nerves, our arms, the nerves in our spinal cord? Are we aware of the lymph (Page 45) glands in the right and left of our throat, and our arm pits, and our groin? We can be aware. We can develop this further. We can be aware of our heart beat. We can be aware of our pancreas, duodenum, liver. We can even be aware of the cells in our brain, of the pituitary gland, the hypothalamus. 

We have that sensitivity. It is warped by the fact that our senses are turned outward. If we downplay the impressions from outside, then we can be much more conscious of what's happening within our own body. We can reach a point where we can actually feel a kind of tingling within our body. It's not just in the skin, but inside the body, a kind of very quick vibration, pulsing very very fast, something like 10 to the power of 20. It's a feeling of the tingling, the giggling of the cells. Actually, they are sparkling, not just giggling. They are emitting photons. The light that has been absorbed is now processed in the very cells of our body and then emitted as radiant light. That's what we call our aura, fluorescence. 

Inhale. Try to feel the way the body is absorbing light. Hold the breath and concentrate on the sparkling--the giggling first and then the sparkling. It is of the cells, but of course we can't feel the cells individually, so it's an overall feeling of flashes, sparkling, a lot of colors like a kaleidoscope. As we exhale, we're aware not just of radiating light, not just our skin, the surface of our body, but all the cells radiating light. Here again is mind over body. We can enhance the radiation of our body, called bioluminescence, by simply visualizing and willing it. 

I have been doing these practices at night under the stars. Then it becomes very realistic, because I can sense the way the light of the stars has been traveling through space at a speed of 86,000 miles a second and literally hitting the body, bombarding the body with light. The cells of the body are picking up that light. They don't reflect. It's not like a mirror. They are transformed by that light. They process that light. The light they radiate is something they make themselves. It's not just boomeranged light that accrued to them from outside.

Here is a further practice: turning within. So far when we held our breath, we were just aware of the cells of our body that are the outer expression of a deeper reality we call virtual or latent. When we hold our breath now, we have to overcome our mental representations of what we imagine life to be. The light we are familiar with is light emitted from a source located in space: the headlamps of a car, the sun, a candle whatever. All we perceive is only the surface of reality, as it appears at the surface. Below that there is a reality which cannot be the object of our experience, and we cannot represent it the way we represent the outer world. The best example of it would be radio waves where everything is intermeshed with everything else. 

Swimming at the surface of a lake we see water lilies. If we swim under the surface, we see it is really a network of roots that emerges as flowers. That's what Dr. David Bohm calls the implicate state behind the explicate state, and that is what we are doing as we turn within. The Sufis say it (Page 46) is that which transpires behind that which appears. 

What we experience is just the surface. Now we are shifting our perspective, so we cannot perceive that which is at the surface. We don't perceive that which is below the surface. We are part of it. It's really a resonance, like a harp and a piano that have been tuned to the same pitch. Play one and the other starts resounding by sympathetic resonance. That's what it is. It's a different mode of cognizance than perception. 

We have to alter our sense of being the witness, witnessing other than ourselves, and submerge our vantage point, the focal point of our consciousness, into the totality. I suppose the best way of thinking of it is the totality of the Universe keeps on emerging as each one of us. We are getting in touch with the subliminal reality of our being which is in resonance and consonance and harmony with all other beings, with the whole Universe.

In terms of light, that's what Pir-o-Murshid calls the all-pervading light. In terms of sound, it's what the Sufis call the Saut e Sarmad, which is the unheard music. Sound is only the way we perceive vibrations of energy. The reality is the vibration. As we turn within, we discover the ground tone of the whole Universe that becomes perceptible when it impinges above the threshold between the explicate state and the implicate state.

Concentrate on the eyes. The retin of our eyes are very sensitive to light. Light passes through the cornea, which is a lens. Light gets threaded up through the optic nerves and fills the brain. Exactly as we absorb light through our skin, we absorb light through our eyes. That light gets collected in the brain. The cells of the brain absorb light and giggle and sparkle. Then it's shunted down through the spinal cord, through the whole body. The light in the cells of the body is also enhanced by the light that is shunted down from the brain.

As we inhale, we represent the way light from the environment -- it could be electric light, it could be the light of a candle, it could be the light of the sun or the stars -- gets absorbed in the retina. The retina is an extension of the brain and the optic nerve. Also feel the delight of light, the ecstasy enjoyed by our eyes at being receptive to light.

The opposite is also true. Our eyes project light into the environment through their retin. The light we absorb is so much stronger than the light we emit that we are not aware of the light we emit. We can enhance the light we emit through our eyes simply by the mind/body axis. We concentrate on the beams of light that cast forward from the brain, through the optic nerves, through the retina and the cornea, right into outer space. We can do that with closed eyelids, as we inhale, absorbing light and as we exhale radiating light, just two beams of light. 
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As we hold our breath after inhaling, there are two steps. First, we are aware of not just the light within the brain, but high frequency light, which passes through the skull. That's the reason for what is called the corona, or the crown of the mystics and saints. Light becomes very effective above the head. It's ultraviolet colorless light. When we hold our breath, we turn our eyeballs upwards. We prepare ourselves while inhaling, but particularly as we hold our breath, we turn our eyeballs upwards, and curl the tongue, pressing the bottom of the tongue against the palate only during the holding of the breath. When we exhale, the eyes get focused in their normal position and the tongue is in its normal position. 

As we exhale, we are not just shunting the light in the brain through the optic nerves, through the retina, and into outer space, but the light above our head as well. The view of Ibn' Arabi and Najm ud-din Kubra is there are several levels of light. It is a higher level of light which now passes through the light of our glance, like the river Rhone passing through the Lake of Geneva, light passing through a light. This ultimately gives us the ability to grasp the countenance behind the face, and the auras of flowers and crystals. 

If we were to open our eyes, we would most likely lose our concentration on those two beams of light. However, if we practice this a lot, for months, we get to the point where we can open our eyes and not let our eyes be forced into focus by the objects in front of them. Everything will look like a blur, but just concentrate on those two beams of light and the way those beams illuminate all things. Open the eyes just at the moment of exhaling. Then as soon as objects start coming into focus, close the eyes again. 

This takes months and months of practice. Eventually we turn our glance toward a person. We start with a flower or a crystal, then gradually we trust ourselves to look at a person. We no longer see the features of the face of that person, we grasp their celestial face. We have to experience it to realize what it is. It's the reality behind that which appears in the face. 

Another practice, done by the Zen Buddhists, is to take an object, particularly a crystal. Instead of scanning it, that is instead of passing in review the different facets of the crystal, we grasp it as a unit. Don't move the eyes, displace the glance. Hold it for twenty minutes. We see the objects in the room, but the crystal now seems to be floating in space. 

There is a further step. We may be aware of the light of our aura, but are we aware of the colors? There is colored light in it. We start simply by imagining the color yellow. Then imagine that our aura is yellow and see how it feels. Like the yellow robe of some of the sannyasins. Imagine the color blue. Imagine for example, the Virgin Mary as always dressed in blue. Her aura is blue, light blue. See how different it is from the yellow. It represents an immaculate state, the (Page 48) yellow a much more radiant state. Orange is much warmer. Green is very vital. Red is passion, anger, mastery, suffering, crucifixion, resurrection. We can will our aura by our imagination exactly as we can will our arm to rise. We can will our aura to vibrate at that speed, at that rate which is experienced as yellow or as blue or whatever. 

This is something that will take many months of practicing. What I suggest is to write in a book the different stages over a period of a year. We know at a certain date we pass to the next stage. Don't do it all at once. 

The next stage would be representing the color red at the bottom of the spine. Actually we are enhancing the infrared. The body is in a continual state of combustion; it's burning. That's why we have a temperature. It emits infrared rays. We can enhance the intensity of those rays by our visualization. That's what the Tibetans do in the snow, tumo. They imagine the body being a source of heat, a furnace, and they are able to dry wet towels on their back. There are even competitions to see how quickly they can dry the towels on their back. It's a function that is not extremely active in the human being but can be enhanced. There are rishis who sit in a dark cave. Their whole body becomes radiant, just like a bat. Bats in a cave, and deep sea fish, and fireflies are able to produce light from the combustion of their body. 

What we want to do now is to transmute that infrared light into ultraviolet light. The way of doing that is first to concentrate on each chakra, and its corresponding color in turn. Eventually we are able to pass the whole gamut of chakras in review in one inhaling: red at the bottom of the spine, a kind of vermilion or terra cotta in the second chakra, orange in the solar plexus, and gold in the heart, green in the throat center; blue in the eyes, and violet in the third eye, colorless light above the head--rather like a diamond, sparkling with all colors of light, all kinds of colors.

Now we do something very dramatic. As we hold our breath, we turn our eyeballs upward, curl our tongue and press it against the palate. Instead of representing the colorless light above our head, we represent our intelligence as luminous. The body is now the underpinning, the infrastructure. It is serving our intelligence, or rather the intelligence of the Universe in us, as us. The way to do this is to think we have awakened from the perspective of the physical world.  (Page 49) We've shifted our perspective, our vantage point. We can't see the physical world anymore. 

Then we pass in review different levels of light, the reflexes of light. Finally, we make a real quantum leap. We really give up any kind of sense of our aura at least for a short instant and think that our body, all these things, our mind, is only a support system for intelligence. Intelligence is luminous. Consciousness is picking up information. Intelligence is thrusting its own inborn knowledge on all things, recognizing things because they match something that is already written into intelligence. 

We wake up very intensely, like waking up from sleep. We're waking up from day consciousness. Remember to turn the eyeballs upwards, and the tongue. We lose the sense of being the witness, Shahid, realize what we think is our own intelligence is the Divine intelligence. It's not different; it is the Divine thinking, but limited, just like a fraction of a hologram is limited. It represents the hologram but in a limited way. We have to give up any idea of being the witness, or even being passive to the Divine witness. It's just that the witness has shifted to a point now where it is impersonal.

As we inhale, there are two steps. One is to thrust the light of our intelligence upon our aura. The clarity of our insight has the effect of enhancing the radiation of our aura. That is what is meant in the Q'uran by "a light upon a light." I often give the example of a little child. The mother is showing the little child a puzzle, and she says, "Can you see the pixie in the tree?" The child says,"No, Mummie. I can't see it." "Look again." "No, Mummie. Can't see it." "Look again." Then all of a sudden the child sees it and the whole face of the child lights up. It's an 'aha' moment. That's what awakening is like. It's like, "Yes, I see. How different from how I always thought." The 'I' that is seeing this is understanding it's not the personal. When we say "I see," we don't mean 'me,' my personal 'me,' but the whole Universe awakening as our personal insight. 

We can of course, thread the light down along the chakras, the opposite of what we were doing as we were inhaling, passing the chakras in the descent instead of the ascent. 

There is a further step: infusing our glance with the light of intelligence. We've already had the light of the brain threaded through the optic nerves. We've already had the corona above the head, the very fine light of the glance passing through the glance just like the water of the Rhone passing through the Lake of Geneva. This is something else. The light upon the light is a different type of light. It's what the Sufis call the light that sees rather than the light that can be seen. It cannot be the object of our perception. Imagine our intelligence is the light that sees, and our glance is the instrument for this light that sees. 
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 Time 

Start to meditate by just becoming aware of the breath. Because of our awareness, it will slow down. Always start with exhaling. Make an effort, try to extend the exhaling each time a little longer. Inhale without effort. On the beginning of the exhaling, contract the abdomen, and then the chest. Inhaling, dilate the abdomen and then the chest. It seems strange, because as we are exhaling, we are expelling, and of course our magnetic field and our aura are extending. We're contracting our body, and extending our etheric body, or aura. As we inhale, we are converging the light field of the Universe and the magnetic field of the Universe as our electromagnetic field. At the same time we are dilating our abdomen and then our chest. 

If we hold our breath between inhaling and exhaling it's just like a pendulum. At first it was swinging. Now we realize there are two points at which the pendulum stands still. Time has been suspended. That's what the Sufis call 'the instant of time.' We've lost the sense of becoming, of advancing in time, of what is called 'the arrow of time.' That instant is not measurable in time. We think there is a holding of our breath for a period of time, but time is suspended. That is the time something new can emerge, in a state of suspense, when everything is in a state of readiness to change. If it were not so, then everything in life would be the consequence of what precedes--determinism, causality--whereas it's only possible for there to be a new dispensation if somehow there is a break in continuity. That is the moment we experience freedom. 

As we inhale, we experience the way the past has its consequences in our life, in our being, what we've done, our ancestry. We're conditioned. In that moment when we're holding our breath think that we've found a reprieve from our conditioning. As a matter of fact, we can take whatever direction we want. In the instant of time, all possibilities are at hand. When we are going through a crisis, it seems like there is a transit from one state to another. We deplore that situation, but perhaps it's the most desirable one, because that's where we can bring about a change. 

There's a breathing practice we can do. Place the thumb of the right hand under the chin, and the middle finger in the proximity of the right nostril. The palm of the left hand goes against the back of the right hand, and the thumb of the left hand is in the proximity of the left nostril. Now we just simply watch our breath. With every breath we exhale a little longer, and inhale. We find after having exhaled a little longer, we're able to take in more oxygen when we inhale, and we're able to hold our breath longer. Now as we inhale, we press both our thumb and our middle finger, and just consider we're in a state of suspense as the pendulum reaches its zenith. It's not just time that is suspended, but also our sense (Page 51) of location in space, and our sense of self-image, and our consciousness of our body, and ultimately our sense of individuality. 

This is a state in which everything is everywhere, all intermeshed like radio waves. To be creative, this is the moment when we consider how we could be if we would be as we might be. Just sense possibilities. Instead of having been constrained by the way situations are, we have a sense of 'what if?' All possibilities are available. It's just a matter of picking one and making it really happen. The future isn't there but it's bountiful and within us as a latency. What we make of it is the future. Then exhale.

We can inhale through the left nostril by pressing the middle finger of the right hand on the right nostril. Hold the breath, thinking, "I'm free. I don't have to toe the line. I don't have to continue being what I have been so far. I've found freedom. Freedom from my opinion. Freedom from my self-image. I can be what I want to be." We could--even in this instant of time which is timeless--always have a flash like, "Well I could be dancing with joy. I could be radiant. I could be fully in control." Just imagine all the things we'd like to be. 

After that moment of suspense, we exhale through the right nostril, and sense that all that we have collected, experienced, all the enrichment that's taken place in the course of our life, is transmuted. That's the experience not just of transfiguration, but of resurrection. Nothing gets lost in the return of the pendulum. The knowhow we've gained by our experience is recycled. The program of the Universe keeps on improving, being upgraded. 

After exhaling, we inhale through the right nostril. This is where we experience the pull of the future. This is how things could be. When we are in a state of suspense, we are experiencing the potentialities. Now we are experiencing a very concrete picture, a vision of how circumstances would be affected by the way we have changed. That's how we are building the future. We experience the pull of the future. We can see the retroaction of the future on the past as we inhale through the right nostril. 

There is another period of suspense, the instant of time. We get back to the way our programming seems to have been initiated before we impacted it by our will. It's not quite our fate. It's the way things were in their original state before they took shape. It's as though the pendulum reaches a certain point at the right, and the force that was generated, the momentum, continues to rise during the suspense, and is extended as we exhale, and as we inhale, the pendulum starts moving down again and returns to its original point. It's not that the pendulum swings higher and higher. Eventually the end point we get to is the same as the starting point. That's why I say, it's not quite your fate. It's just returning to the source. 
 (Page 52) 
Now we inhale through both nostrils, hold the breath, and then exhale through both nostrils. This is where we experience the attractor that is not in time, but beyond time. After inhaling through both nostrils, we reach a samadhi state. The way to do it is to consciously transfer our attention from one chakra to the next. Consider that we're working with energy, and the energy acts as a lift which is hoisting our consciousness aloft. As we hold our breath, those are conditions that are favorable to a flash of a state of samadhi. Turn the eyeballs upwards and press the tongue against the palate. Here is another moment of suspense. There are three states of suspense in the pendulum. This is not a temporary state of suspense. It's a state where time and space are suspended eternally. It is really the original state. There is a difference between everlastingness and eternity. 

As we transfer our attention from one chakra to the next, we need to, at the same time, be aware of the quantum leaps in our mode of thinking. At each level, there is a further level of thinking, and also our sense of identity. We start by identifying with our physical body. Then we identify with the template (in the Kabbala it is Yesod) which is the electromagnetic field. The solar plexus is where we come in contact with the all possibilities in the Universe--God in His/Her aspect of virtuality and all possibility in the void, the unknown, the hidden treasure. In the heart center we identify with our aura of light, and realize our thinking has changed. Najm ud-din Kubra calls that "the witness in the heavens." We are beginning to have some sense of how things would look from the vantage point of the angel, the celestial nature, our celestial counterpart. 

We reach a very extraordinary level, corresponding with the throat center, a transformation of the witness in us. The witness in us is the Divine witness that is seeing things from the Divine point of view, always seeing how the programming is worked out--how the software is worked out in the hardware. It's very perplexing because we have so much freedom, and there is still some sense of programming, which is not the same thing as conditioning. It's at the archetypal level. If we reach beyond that in the third eye, we reach a point in which we are aware of the archetypes behind the exemplars. For example, if a person is peaceful, we would say, "I see peace coming through that person," instead of saying, "That person is peaceful." So we're seeing the archetype instead of the exemplar. We're seeing the archetype in the exemplar. That's the point of Lahut in Sufi terminology. 

There is one more quantum leap beyond any sense of bodiness. Maybe the pituitary gland is the stepping stone, but somehow we overstep it. We disregard it, it's a stepping stone. We kick the ladder. All we thought and thought we knew--our conceptions of life, our self-image, our sense of ourselves as a subject--all that vanishes altogether. We're not the subject anymore, seeing an object. That's past. Now we black out. It is important to maintain a kind of distant memory of the physical scenario, but vaguely familiar so that we remember all those experiences we had. I suppose we could say our memory is transmuted into its quintessence. At some point, even that last ultimate crutch vanishes from under our feet. We have nothing to hold on to. 
 (Page 53) 
This is not a state we can hold. The Upanishads say it passes before we know it. We try to capture it again but we can't. So we let it go, but we are awed, and perplexed, and shattered, and overwhelmed. When I say 'I,' I don't mean 'me' any more. There is not a way of saying it in our language. Every time we arrest our inhaling as we hold our breath, we peak. These are like flashes we can't hold, like an 'aha' feeling, a sudden feeling of awakening. 

As we exhale, we have an overview. It's amazing -- as if we are flying very high and have an overview of the planet; as if we were in outer space, even beyond, outside the planetary system or the galaxy. It's very difficult to describe. We see our life in a very broad panorama. We are aware of the fact that we had somehow landed on the planet Earth, but somehow we had always existed and will always exist, but it's not us anymore. It's impersonal, but still the seed of our individuality is there. 

When we look at our earthly condition, we can see it as a condition of Earth. Instead of thinking that we landed, we think two things. One is that somehow our consciousness shifted to the existential level, so we are the witness. The other is that our eternal being is unique. This is the Sufi idea of multiplicity in unity, Ahadiat, beyond qualities. We're not talking about qualities at this level, just being, so how that diversity comes in we can't understand, but somehow our being has impregnated the features we inherited from our ancestors, and eventually impregnated the configuration of the stardust into our body, as our body. Our body not only inherits the features of our ancestors, but the uniqueness of our being is imprinted upon it as well. 

It's a descent of consciousness, states of consciousness. We become more and more aware of the existential levels of reality, but there is also a concretization of what we are and still continue to be. Not what we were, but what what we were, what we are, what we continue to be,what we always will be, what we always have been, concretized right down into the features of our body. Somehow the whole Universe, cosmos has enfolded itself as us, not just our ancestry. We can see that as though we are looking at things from a bird's eye view. 

Then we can see how we took decisions and consequently determined the course of our life, and then perhaps changed our mind, which is difficult or impossible, because we had determined a whole set of circumstances. We can see the whole thing, see our involvement with people. We can see how the social, physical, and psychological environment has also imprinted itself on our being, so we're a product of our culture, our education, our standard of life, and all kinds of things that accrue to what we were in our pristine state. We may consider ourselves in the role of a tourist on planet Earth, but having been a tourist, we have really started to impact the planet with our being. We've transformed things, even materially, so we're not a tourist anymore, but we remember having not yet existed on the planet.
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Of course from this point of view, we see all the mistakes we made, and the way we had to go through our trip, and make our way through life with really very little knowledge of what was involved--very much a child in error. Of course, each one of us has, I hope, attained some measure of realization through our experience on Earth, and that has enriched our being. 

The original state is beyond the state of the celestial sphere. Still, at that level we can see how there has been a defilement in the course of the descent, but also an enrichment. The defilement, I suppose, is the disadvantage of the advantage, the price we paid. We can't stay an angel. Somehow we forgot who we were. Now we're starting to remember. 

It is really a matter of extrapolating between levels of our being, instead of toggling. That's called awakening in life instead of awakening beyond life. To awaken beyond life, in samadhi, we have to definitely downplay one level and highlight another, whereas in the descent, the most wonderful thing we can do is to be able to extrapolate between levels of our being and see how they interconnect, to realize the child in us is still there, but other elements have come in. It's still there and can be recovered. At the same time we can develop power, majesty, mastery. 
 (Page 55) 
 Through the Eyes of the Angel 

As we inhale, we are aware of the way the impressions of the world get ingested in our psyche. We're really not only eating the planet--because our food is the havoc of the planet--but also at the psychological level we are being continually enriched by elements that have accrued to us from outside and are digested. 

The immune system rejects elements that are foreign. That's the first immune system, based upon a sense of identity, and we reject any element that does not have the same DNA as the cells of the body. If that were the only immune system, of course we would not be able to eat food. The immune system is able to adapt itself to elements that are foreign to itself, so the sense of 'me' can be enriched, and is enriched. 

However, if we are over-indulgent, accommodating, then we suffer a kind of indigestion, and lose our sense of identity. That's what a lot of us are doing: losing our sense of identity. As we are meditating, we have the ability to reject elements too foreign to our being and therefore indigestible, detrimental to our being. The method of doing that we can learn from the sannyasins of India. We surround ourselves with a zone of silence, a kind of protective zone, and surround ourselves with guardians who will reject that which is undesirable. It is our sense of who we are, our uniqueness, that is going to help us reject impressions we feel are deleterious or damaging. 

A second function is assimilation. The impressions are transformed in our psyche. To be digested, to become part of our being, they are transmuted. When we are meditating, instead of just thinking of the impressions of the social or psychological environment (which we do if we don't know how to meditate) we try to see what is enacted behind the events, behind the occurrences. The clue to that is in what we call the wazaif. Actually it's the Ism'illahi, the names of God. For example, we may see what is enacted in this situation is compassion; that which is at stake in this situation, what we are tested in, is compassion. It might be our truthfulness, peacefulness or mastery. We see the occurrence is just the outer expression of an inner reality, and that is the quality. That's why we work in the Sufi Order with wazaif, the qualities. That's a deeper reality. The impressions from outside are somehow transmuted. When we turn within we experience the way the qualities emerge. 

As we inhale, we are drawing on the impressions of the environment. We're filtering them, transmuting them. Holding our breath, we're beginning to capture the emergent potentialities in our being. It's better to earmark one quality, and see how it unfurls in our personality. Just like a flower, the fresh petals in the center begin to unfurl as we exhale. 
 (Page 56) 
If we just take outside circumstances as the object of our cognition, or actually our assessment, and we interpret them according to our personal bias, we are going to carry in our psyche a false assessment of our circumstances. Just imagine carrying in our psyche a false assessment of our situation throughout our life. It's most important to correct that. That means we have to question our assessment. 

When people go to psychotherapists, they are caught in a perspective. They assess situations, they are convinced that situations are the way they assess them, not realizing that they are looking at things from a personal bias. There has been damage to their psyche because they think they have been damaged. The psychotherapist is supposed to heal that wound because there is emotion in it. In the spiritual field, we are working with questioning our assessment and then encouraging the creativity of our being, so we want to highlight our impact on the environment rather than the impact of the environment upon us. 

Remember the lake and the lotus flowers or water lilies at the surface, and remember the roots. Now we're alternating between what we call in our Sufi language ya Zahir and ya Batin. Zahir is like reaching out, Batin is turning within, the veiled one. 

Now perhaps we can see another feature of this. Imagine that our face is a mask. Behind the mask is the shape or the features; we call it the countenance. We could say it's the features of our aura, that have a configuration in the fabric of light. Normally we identify with the outside, what we see in the mirror, what we think people see, only the outer expression, which is very misleading if we do not see that which transpires behind that which appears. When we turn within, we see all this time we've been identifying with this form of our body, and we realize it was just the way it appears at the surface. That's not really what we are. 

We are playing a role, and normally we don't quite realize it. "I'm a business man, or business woman," or "I'm a cook," or "I'm a carpenter, policeman, philosopher, musician," whatever. The king thinks he is a king because he is sitting on a throne and people say, "Your majesty." If that were not so then he would have difficulty in thinking he is a king. We allow ourselves to be deceived by the role the world exacts from us. The guru thinks he or she is a guru because he or she centers into the image that people project upon him/her. When we are trying to live up to something we are not, it can lead to terrible dishonesty. So we eject, somehow, our role, and that's how we discover who we really are. 

We must also work with our thinking. We are so used to expressing what we think in language (and we know very well that what we explain is inadequate in comparison to what we imply) that we are not in touch with what we imply. Even when we are silent, we are still are explaining things, our thoughts in our minds. 
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If we are making a retreat and observing silence, we not only get used to not speaking, but we get used to converting our thoughts into an explanation, something that can be explicated. Consequently we become conscious of the emergence of what one might call the implicit rather than the explicit. That is the meaning of Batin. That is the hidden treasure of the Sufi dervishes. It is sacred, and therefore secret. It's very important for our self-esteem to validate the sacredness of the deep core of our being which is continually being humiliated by people who deride us, or ignore us, or undermine us, or betray us. 

Furthermore, as we turn within, we begin to understand, to grasp, what could be a form without contours, without profile. The photographs of flowers made by Walter Chappel show the edge of the petals, and beyond that a corona, like in Kirlian photography. It doesn't have an edge, so it gives a sense of what I call a configuration that is not a gestalt. It is not a form; it is the origin of form. It is that which jells in a form. 

If we think we are wearing a mask, and we eject the mask, we don't have that defense, we don't have that crutch protecting us. Now we are faced with absolute authenticity. This is what we really are, and it comes through. At first we have some sense of the features of our countenance. It clicks: "This is me. It's quite different from what I see when I look in a mirror, what I think I am." That's the breakthrough. 

If we start investigating further, we find the countenance is many-faceted. As a matter of fact, it's more like a holograph. The images are interspersed, and not quite distinct. The setting of our consciousness can be very clear from one image to the next, but there is a sort of gray area between them sometimes where there is a mix, so the word many-faceted is not quite correct. It's also many-tiered. There are different levels. It's more complex than we think at first. What is more, it is dynamic instead of static. It's changing all the time. It's disintegrating and renewing itself. 

We want to see, to witness the impact of our attunement and our thinking upon the shape of our aura. Remember what we did with light. We can feel our aura. At first it's kind of vague. It's like the photographs of Walter Chappel. It doesn't have an edge, and we can't really distinguish a shape. We start working with the colors. 

We recognize somehow a countenance in the aura. It changes so quickly, depending upon our attunement, that what I suggest is to concentrate on a quality, for example compassion. Imagine a situation in which our compassion is called upon, is aroused: a person who is suffering pain, or a person in a concentration camp, a person who is dejected, or has been abused, a person who has lost self-esteem. Our heart goes out to her/him. That's the practice of ya Rahim. Just the (Page 58) word doesn't do it for us. We have to experience not just the emotion of compassion, but the way it fashions our subtle body, and particularly our aura. This is called "making states of consciousness corporeal." That's what life is about. Pure thought and pure emotion becomes concretized as form. That's the creativity of the cosmos. What is the expression of the countenance of our aura in the fabric of light as a result of our heart having been deeply shattered by the pain of another person? Our compassion, our love, goes out to that person. 

This is one of the methods whereby we can unfurl the potentialities of our being, by envisioning them actualized in real life situations instead of in an abstract way. Repeating a wazifa will not do it for us unless we really experience the emotion, and how that particular wazifa fashions itself into the configuration of our aura. That's the way we become a beautiful being: by unfurling our potentialities. 

In another example, a situation may require a lot of control. There are a lot of examples, skiing, piloting a plane, hang gliding, conducting an orchestra. These require a lot of control. We think of our life as a challenge which calls upon our ability to take responsibility. There are features latent in our being that will only unfurl if we do take responsibility. See how it imprints the configuration of our countenance, in fact the fabric of our aura. Once it does that, it becomes adamant. Otherwise it's still a potentiality--it comes and goes, whereas now we've made it adamant. That is what is gained by life. God becomes a reality right into our body. How very different this shape is from the configuration when we think of a person who is suffering. 

We can think of joy. I remember seeing a statue of a Chinese monk in the Golden Gate Museum in San Francisco. His whole expression was pure delight, pure joy. We have moments of glee, for example, watching a beautiful sunrise from a high mountain amidst the clouds when there is thunder down below. There are situations that are absolutely exalting: being in love, being absolutely in admiration before a hero who gave his/her life for an ideal, or just thinking of the miracle of life. Isn't that extraordinary--that we are here, that we are here together? The miracle of life.

A state of bewondering affects the fashioning of our aura. It starts by bewondering and eventually culminates in prayer and glorification. The word used by the Sufis is splendor, splendor that manifests as beauty on the earth. The Sufis always highlight two polar aspects of God. One is splendor and the other is majesty. Splendor manifests as beauty on the earth--heaven on Earth--and majesty as sovereignty. It is Majid that manifests as Qahr. 

We started by trying to capture the emergent potentialities in our being, having turned within. Now we're working with another dimension. It's not the dimension that emerges from within recurrently, but the transcendent dimension we (Page 59) represent as descending from above. It doesn't descend from above, but it's convenient to think of it as descending: the exemplar of the archetype. We have the ability to always imagine a quality more wonderful, more perfect than we have been able to imagine so far. That is a sense of the archetype as compared with the way the quality has actuated itself in our character as an idiosyncrasy, our quest of the absolute, "a passion for the unattainable." Divine perfection is always beyond what we could ever imagine, and it lures us beyond our limitations. That's the reason for the wazaif, because we have the capacity to imagine a quality more wonderful than we had imagined so far. Eventually there is that attractor, the Divine being.

So far we have been trying to foster the unfoldment of our being, or even the actualization of our being, by our own free will. For example, I said imagine a situation in which a person is suffering. That was our initiative. Creativity is really the way the Divine initiative, the Divine will, is customized in each of us. Now we encounter the ultimate objective of the Sufis. We look at things from the antipolar point of view to our personal point of view. We start to get into the consciousness of more and more people until, as Saint Francis said, the Universe is looking at us instead of us looking at the Universe. That's the way we start reaching into an antipolar vantage point to our personal vantage point. That is what I call the cosmic dimension. 

We want to reach into an antipolar point of view, but transcendent rather than cosmic. That's what happens when we get into samadhi and we have an overview. We descended very rapidly when we started to look at the world from this overview, but now we can stay in this vantage point while extrapolating it with the personal one. That's what Sufism is about. It's not just losing ourselves in the Divine viewpoint, but also seeing how the Divine point of view is customized in our personal point of view. There are two poles, one infinite and the other finite.

It sounds like metaphysics, but we have to try and really do it. We have to approach it by experience rather than metaphysically. Ibn' Arabi says, "Since the ephemeral manifests the eternal, by the knowledge of the eternal you can have cognizance of the ephemeral." That is, we can know ourselves by knowing God. We might have thought that we can know God by knowing ourselves. Maybe both are true. We don't know roundness except through round objects. Ibn' Arabi has sometimes been misquoted, and perhaps it is the knowledge of the ephemeral that gives us a sense of the eternal. 

We start by arousing the qualities, our idiosyncrasies, which are imperfect. Somehow we are perfecting them by imagining them as more and more perfect, in order to project them upon what we imagine God to be. We can't really know ourselves. We know who we are, but actually we can't really know who we are, because we can only know who we are through the way which God discovers Him/Herself as us. It doesn't work otherwise; it's bipolar. That's the reason we (Page 60) turn in circles. When we meditate, if we don't include the Divine perspective, then we're caught up in our own little trip. We think we're experiencing ecstasy and that's purely deceptive. 

How can we look at things from the Divine point of view? We start by having an overview of our lives. That isn't quite it yet, but it's helpful. We can't do it with our will. That is the reason why there is a stage in our development called Malakut, the celestial level. That is a stepping stone towards getting into the Divine consciousness. We change our vantage point by identifying with our celestial counterpart, the child in us. The celestial vantage point is the way our heart senses situations instead of our mind. Najm ud-din Kubra said, "You thought you were the spectator, but the real spectator is your celestial counterpart." That's a higher level of perception. 

When we see things from the vantage point of the angel we are very sensitive to dishonesty in other people, and particularly in ourselves. We are very wary of manipulating people, which is of course dishonesty. We become disgusted by the psychological filth we see around us, and we are defenseless. That's the trouble, the angel is defenseless. We can't count upon our defense system any more, so it's very special condition, but that's the gateway to the Divine consciousness, to how things look from the Divine point of view. 

This is the real action around which the whole of Sufism gravitates. "I know God through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through me. I know God through the knowledge that God has of Him/Herself through my knowledge of Him/Her." When we go further we say, "God knows Him/Herself through discovering His/Her potentialities in our form, through which He reveals Him/Herself to us, and by discovering God exemplified in the subtle form of our body." That's why we're working with it; we are able to discover the meaning of God beyond form.
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 Clues 

We need to get into our emotions, because it is only the emotion of the soul that will make a transit between the personal way of looking at things and the Divine vantage point. If we observe, we see there is a way of self-examination, getting back into the subject-object format. We consider our body as a formation that is molded by the whole Universe. If we do that, we are able to disidentify with our body, but that's not the objective. The objective is to not be so confined to our body consciousness that we are not aware of the other levels of our being. In the course of meditation, we can do the same thing with our mind. We can observe our thoughts objectively and realize our thoughts have been conditioned to a very large extent by our civilization, our culture, our environment, our education, and so on. 

If we are able to look at our thoughts without being in them--with a certain distance--we find freedom and detachment, by being able to look at them. We see how they are generated, how they emerge, and they don't have the same kind of impact on our identity as when we identify with them totally.

We can do the same thing with our personality. We observe that we have certain idiosyncrasies which might have been inherited from our father or mother or grandparents or ancestors. We need to live with them, exactly the way we need to live with our body, except--what I've been saying so far is Buddhism--in Sufism, having watched our body, we realize it is not just a formation of the cosmos, but carries the hallmark of our being, so instead of discarding it, we do all the things we've been doing to transform it. Dr. David Bohm said, "Be not surprised if a change of meaningfulness alters the circuits in your brain, and eventually alters your whole body." That's what we call the mind/body axis. 

We think of our body not just as an instrument, but as something that has accrued to our being in the course of time, the course of our descent to the existential state. Consequently it has now become part of us. It's not just something from which we can unclothe our self, and leave on the planet as we die. In fact it will continue to live; the electrons are transformed into photons for one thing, and the electrons themselves live forever. Our concepts of death are totally off, not reliable. 

If we do that with our mind, our thinking, we see how very inadequate our logical thinking is, and consequently we are not caught in it. We have been interpreting our problems with our inadequate minds. We now realize there are different levels of thinking. We've already talked about what we imply behind (Page 62) what we explain. That's another level of thinking. There is a level of thinking in which we are able to extrapolate between two thoughts, and more thoughts, in a concatenation. That is called reconciling the irreconcilables. 

There is a way of thinking about our identity by which we can see we are a condition of the Universe, just like a wave is a condition of the sea. We can distinguish the emotions of the body from the emotions of the mind. For example, if we come across an interesting idea, there is an emotion in it. Consider the emotions of the heart. There are an enormous variety of emotions, like satisfaction: acquiring something we wanted to have, or being successful, or buying a new car, or having our love reciprocated in a personal way. That kind of emotion can quicken the heart and make us dependent on the situations that arouse emotion, so if we want to get into the Divine consciousness, we need to feel very clearly what emotions are affecting us, and at what level. 

This is particularly true in our relationships with people. There are people whose emotions tend to pull us down. Of course we adapt ourselves to those people, because that's the only way to relate, and if we are too aloof, we don't have a living exchange of relationship. In one way we are objective, being able to assess the kind of emotion allowing certain people to inspire us, lift our emotion, make us high. Others are depressed or simple, and we feel the egotism in their emotion that may call upon the same kind of egotism in ourselves. We have to become, as we evolve, very sensitive to the emotions around us. This is still being objective, observing. 

That's the Hindu way, and the Buddhist way. The Sufi way is to live our emotions very deeply, instead of observing them. For example, the emotion of bodily pain is something that can lead to ecstasy. I was talking to a woman who, just like my sister, was tortured in a concentration camp and thrown into a dungeon for dead. She had lost her sight and her bones had been fractured. There she was at 73, smiling, full of joy. She said the Nazis used to enjoy her screaming, so she decided not to scream. She said, "If you do it for a cause, there is a kind of ecstasy." Think of the ecstasy of Christ on the cross. Instead of that aloofness we find amongst the sannyasins, even discarding the body, we recognize the way the cosmic celebration in the heavens is worked out right in our bodies, in the drama of the cosmos. We partake of that drama right in our own bodies. 

The same is true of the mind. We are not always aware of the despair of our minds, because we have such difficulty understanding the meaningfulness of our lives. There is a tremendous breakthrough of joy when suddenly the penny drops and we are able to grasp something we had never seen before. For example, "Well as long as I live in these circumstances, I'll never attain illumination." All of a sudden there is an 'aha' feeling. That's just the circumstances in which we could attain illumination. If we are stressed, stress is going to strengthen us. If we try to evade life, then we're not in the race. This is the emotion of the mind. 
 (Page 63) 
Talking with physicists, they seem all intellectual, but they experience the ecstasy of the mind. Even looking at the stars we realize how extraordinary it is that our glance can reach that distance. Many of the stars we're looking at don't exist any more. The Sufis call that perplexity, blowing your mind, as we say in America. We see the incongruity of it all. Reconciling the irreconcilables, beating the ordinary logic of the mind, gives us a great sense of freedom, freedom from the constraint of logic. The Sufis call it the consternation of the mind. We are faced with meaningfulness beyond what we could normally grasp in our minds. We all have that longing. If meditation can trigger off that breakthrough, then we will meditate, and if it doesn't, we won't. The skill consists in not just questioning our grasp of the mind, our understanding, but looking at things from the antipodal standpoint, the Divine standpoint. We have that ability.

A practice we can do on a retreat is walking in nature. We think, "Oh how beautiful! It's wonderful!" There is a kind of ecstasy there, exaltation. We think, "Well I thought I was seeing all of this; I thought I was a spectator, but it's really God who is looking through my eyes." That's a further step. There we are, walking in nature and thinking, "Ah, I am the eyes through which God sees. Isn't that extraordinary? I am the eyes through which God sees His/Her own body," but if we think that way, we are thinking in terms of duality, God and myself, two different beings. They are two poles of the same being. 

There is a third step, "My glance is the Divine glance." That's one of the skills that enables us to start reversing our vantage point and seeing things from the Divine vantage point. It is working with Shahid, with the subject instead of the object. When we're meditating we tend to think in terms of the object. Now we're working with the subject, and it's very perplexing, because my glance is the Divine glance that has been focalized, that has been converged, that has been distorted maybe, but it is still the Divine glance.

We started by being aware of the light our eyes emit. Then we talked about luminous intelligence. Let's think of it as Divine intelligence. Then we said intelligence, the light of the brain, is threaded through the glance. Then we said the light of intelligence infuses the light of the glance. It's not threaded through it, it infuses it. It overarches it. 

The condition for that is to question not just our self-image, but our sense of individuality at the same time. That's a difficult thing. Let's say the seed of individuality is still there. It's difficult to imagine that, as Ibn' Arabi says, "We are God but, know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God." It's paradoxical. If we think of God as other, we'll never make it. That's why the Sufis say, "Why do you seek for God up there? He is here!"

Instead of saying the physical world is maya, the Sufis say the physical world is made of clues. God is revealing Him/Herself by means of signals--ayat--signals (Page 64) which give some sense of the reality behind those clues. For example, watching the film E.T., did we laugh and cry because we saw shadows on the screen? Was it because we saw E.T. through the eyes of that lovely child? We know the face of E.T. was a turtle and the voice was that of an old lady. Those are devices. Spielberg used those devices in order to communicate with us. 

Think of God as communicating His/Her intention by using devices. We take those devices to be real, instead of just clues. That's the reason the Sufis speak about "that which transpires behind that which appears." That which appears is the clue. What transpires is the meaning. That's why we use the wazifa ya Batin. Every time we grasp the clue instead of taking the clue for granted--grasp what the clue stands for--there is a breakthrough of ecstasy. 

In our meditation we look at everything, like situations in our life. We pinpoint a particular situation. "Yes! I've been judging that situation de facto. and actually that is a clue to what is enacted behind the situation." It is a quality. For example, the clue in a political ploy is truth, calling the bluff. If we just say the situation is terrible, of course it is, but the clue is the only way we can grasp what is enacted behind the drama of life, if we are able to see we're being tested in our ability to grasp what is being enacted. 

A further clue is in our own nature. The idiosyncrasies in our being are clues to the Divine nature. The wazaif we use, the names of God, are labels for qualities which are exemplified in our idiosyncrasies, but our idiosyncrasies are just clues that will give us a sense of the Divine nature. God is discovering Him/Herself through our personality and through the way our personality unfurls--discovering Him/Herself, discovering a further aspect of Him/Herself than the aspect of Him/Herself which descends from the Lahut level, which is the archetypes that qualify His/Her being. His/Her being is far beyond those qualities, but that's where the clues start, at the level of the archetypes. 

Instead of thinking, "I want to understand," we think, "God is trying to reveal His/Her intention in the circumstances of my life, also in my being. I can only avail myself of this disclosure if I cease trying to understand, and open myself to what is being revealed to me." That's Sufism. That's the meaning of Zahir. We gave the meaning of Batin, turning within. The real translation of Zahir is the epiphany, the appearance of light. In the Christian story, the three kings were wise men who came to see the appearance of light emanating from the baby Jesus. Everything is the appearance of light, because matter is crystallized light. Light is considered a special form of matter. The whole Universe is the manifestation of the Divine intention coming through as light. 

For example, a crystal could be a subject of our meditation. A crystal does absorb light and emit light exactly as our bodies do. But a crystal is really light that has jelled into what we think is substance. Having jelled, it is still able to absorb light. (Page 65) Now, we think of our body in the same way. One way we can say the being of God is revealed to us is through the light of our aura, and the shape of the light of our aura as we've been working with it. 

Instead of thinking, "I want to perfect myself and become a better person," we see we can't do it like that. We can't sit at the table and compose. We have to be shattered to compose. There has to be a strong emotion. It can't be the result of our will. That's why instead of watching our emotions, we need to go very deeply into them. There are a lot of people, particularly men, who find it difficult to get in touch with their emotions. Women find it easier to do, at least that's the assumption. It's not always true. Getting in touch with emotion doesn't mean being sloppy or mushy. There is a kind of mushy spirituality about. (Look around, you'll see it.) We can be aware of the emotion of the heart. I think psychotherapists are trying to make us aware of the emotion of the heart. Mystics are trying to make us aware of the emotion of our soul, and that is not mushy. That's very deep.
 (Page 66) 
 The Divine Inheritance 

What wazaif, these qualities do is pinpoint aspects of ourselves by the fact they have been disclosed to us. They are being disclosed to us all the time. Then they play a part in our worldview: for example, the wazifa ya Majid, majesty. Hujwiri said, "If you lend yourself to the Divine ecstasy, you are burnt by the fire of the Divine majesty or you are illuminated by the light of the Divine splendor." Those are not necessarily alternatives. They can be combined. The emotion of the soul, in order to be authentic, and not the emotion of the heart (although they are not separate; the emotion of the soul can work in the heart) requires a sense of majesty which we find in the great masters and saints and prophets -- great majesty. 

It's a very important message in our time, when anything goes: gross vulgarity, loss of the sense of dignity. Sufis use the word adab--dignity, nobility, courtesy. Buddha also talks about the stance that corresponds to our state of realization. The more realized we are, the more noble we are. Everybody is in a place in life according to his/her degree of realization. 

This particular wazifa draws our attention to an aspect of ourselves which will make us get in touch with the emotion of our soul. For example we would like to have more authority. We would like to be more successful in life. We find that people who are more successful have more authority. Of course the 'catch 22' in it all is if we try to develop more authority, we are on an ego trip. This is a great secret, to be able to embody the Divine sovereignty without it being an ego trip. That is an emotion of our soul rather than the emotion of a person. 

The practices with wazaif give us access to the skills that enable us to make this quantum leap, to see from the Divine point of view. The wazaif are exactly that bridge. 

Pir-o-Murshid calls it the Divine inheritance. These are qualities we inherit, and they remain latent unless we arouse them, call them forth, and actuate them in our personality. Instead of thinking, "I want to develop this quality," it's better to think, "I inherit this quality, but it is still recessive, instead of dominant, instead of active, but it can be called into action by my concentrating on it, treasuring it, valuing it, and by my realizing it is God who is disclosing His/Her sovereignty to me inasmuch as I exhibit it in my personal idiosyncrasies." That is the link. When I'm walking or talking, I'm really making that Divine sovereignty a reality in my being. That's what Pir-o-Murshid means by making a God a reality. That's what life is about. 
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If we say, "God is disclosing Him/Herself to me," we are still thinking in duality. We start by thinking in terms of duality. It's very difficult to think that it's all one. We could say, "It is my higher self that is disclosing itself to my lower self." It doesn't matter what terms we use. In the course of our spiritual journey, we discover levels of our being. That's what we mean by our higher self. The higher self is the Divine qualities before they are distorted in our personality. That's what the wazifa is about. We are trying to imagine the perfection of a quality. 

According to to Pir-o-Murshid, "God discovers His perfection in our imperfection." That's a very challenging thought: the voice of Caruso present within its distortion, the archetype present within its exemplar, roundness present in round objects, rosehood present in roses, and so on. The archetype is present right there in the exemplar. Not up there, but right here. There is the interplay of my knowing God by the knowledge God has of Him/Herself as me, and God knowing Him/Herself by disclosing Him/Herself in the very form in which I discover God in myself. That's Sufism.

There are wazaif that help us reach into the higher emotions instead of the lower emotions. Two wazaif I think are of great importance: ya Azim, which we could call magnificat, and Ali, which is gloria. Magnificat and gloria: to magnify the Lord; there is a sense of amplitude, of vastness, the cosmic dimension. We think of the galaxies, the marvel of the universe. Our consciousness exalts in that sense of bounty, the richness that is coming through. I call this bewondering. 

Azim is related to the sense of being honored (Muiz). Our exaltation in the marvel of life confers upon us honorability, which is of course a Divine quality, and will uphold our emotions in that high level. For a moment it's cosmic. The high level is ya Ali. That's the gloria instead of the magnificat. It is always imagining a greater perfection than we've imagined so far. In our act of glorification, we are projecting on God those qualities we're familiar with, but imagining them ever more perfect than we've imagined them so far, so we are uplifted. Instead of exalted, we are uplifted and inspired.

To be creative, it's not good enough just to enlist the spontaneous thoughts emerging ex nihlo from within. We have to include all the levels of our being. That's the reason for the Dhikr. We can be creative in a way that is not holistic. There are compositions which are very compelling, which do not exalt us, but are very exciting. A great composition is able to bring something of the Divine into the human. It is not something that emerges from within. Access to the heavenly spheres is the next phase. It's celestial emotion. Ya Ali gives us that sense of celestial emotion, the glorification of the angels. 

Al Hallaj was crucified when he tried to communicate his experience in a very high meditation--trying to get into the Divine consciousness of God discovering Him/Herself in the very first stage in those qualities; discovering not Himself, (Page 68) but an aspect of Him/Herself which can be predicated in the qualities, and exalting in that discovery of those qualities. In order for those qualities to become real, He/She had to project them into beings, so we are the incorporation of those qualities. Instead of thinking of ourselves as people, we think, "I am these qualities that have materialized, actuated themselves as my nature." That's a totally different way of looking at things. Instead of thinking, "I am me. I am a body," we think, "I am the embodiment of all these great qualities which I invoke in those wazaif. According to al Hallaj, "Then God salutes the human being and compliments him on his good looks." There is the importance of the form. What has happened is a reality that has no form assumes a form. 

That's the reason for our quest for beauty. That's why we like flowers. We like to have a beautiful house. We mustn't think it's selfish. We are actuating the Ishq Allah, the Divine impulse. It's building a beautiful world of beautiful people. What are we doing with this world? Just the other way around. We're very, very close to blowing it up--this beautiful planet. If it was inhabited by beautiful people, we wouldn't blow it up. 

A rishi in the mountains told me many years ago the world is in such danger. It's even more true today. He said, "Violence is not going to help. It will just beget violence. The only answer is the exaltation of the human spirit." If you feel a call to do that -- exalt the human spirit -- that's the only thing that will save the planet. 

It's not because we want to become better--that's a selfish motive--but we want to fulfill a purpose. We want our lives to be meaningful in a bigger context than ourselves. Instead of samadhi, think of awakening beyond life. Think of it as our emotions getting transfigured into higher and higher emotions. That's Ananda Samadhi in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. According to the Sufis, it is that which gives us access to the next level, seeing things from the Divine point of view. Malakut leads to Jabbarut. I have tried to avoid referring to these terms because we get loaded with too many terms, but sometimes it's good to have some sense of the lie of the land, an index system. So I'll end by telling what they are. 

Nazut is a purely existential level, and particularly the physical one. Arwah, is the etheric level, the subtle body, Arwah, Ruh, Roha in Hebrew, spirit. Mithal is the world of metaphor, creativity, the myth if you like. The next is Malakut, which is the celestial sphere. 

The next level is Jabbarut, which is the same thing from the Divine point of view. We're working with the subject instead of the object. The subject in us is the Divine knower, the Divine spectator, Shahid. After that is the level of Lahut, which is the level of the archetypes which we exemplify in the wazaif, the qualities. After that is Hahut, which is beyond all qualities. That is the attractor beyond the wheel. It is the eternal level of our being.

Part Three:  The Blueprints
 (Page 69) 
 Spiritual Healing in Our Time 
a dialogue between Pir Vilayat and Himayat Inayati

PIR: There has been, over the course of time, feedback from the joint group healing. We call it a ceremony. I think it's more like a ritual which -- I don't know if it's the right word to use but -- has some magical effect. One has to be careful with that word "magic." Still, we are dealing with great forces that we are triggering off, and if it were not so then there wouldn't be a feedback. There have been some rather miraculous cases of sudden healing -- of course we have to allow for make-believe, suggestion, and all kinds of things -- but still I can see there must be something in it. 

I can tell you a story. There was a woman whose husband was in hospital, very ill -- seriously ill. She asked my uncle, Ali Khan, whether he could help him. My uncle contravened one of the sacrosanct laws of the Healing Order -- that one isn't allowed to heal a person unless the person wishes to be healed by one. The next day the man told his wife when she came to visit, "A dark man came into the room. He was rather stout and bald." That's Ali Khan. "He had such power, I was totally shattered and transformed, and the next day I got up and I was well." Ali Khan was known as a fantastic healer. It is an indication that healing can work, because this man did not know he was being healed. Ali Khan trained in a spiritual school of Sufis in India and there are quite a few cases, especially in India, of miraculous healing. 

I remember the case of a Jain teacher who was organizing a congress of religions, and one month before the congress he was bleeding all over his body. He was told, "If you leave hospital you'll die, and you won't be able to, anyway, there's no way in which you can organize this congress." Then he saw a healer and he was healed, and it lasted until some time after the congress, and then he died. It gave him power to survive. He introduced me to the healer, who was working with the very same method, which was pinching the artery which leads to the heel, pinching it hard so he probably interrupted the circulation of blood in the whole body for a time. He did it to me, and I can tell you it's very painful, not only locally but throughout the whole body, and it did something. I'm not suggesting you try that on people without knowing how to do it. I'm just saying sometimes we need to have some demonstration that healing is effective in case we doubt. There are lots of cases that confirm it which are not based upon wishful thinking. 

There are cases of mind over body, extraordinary cases of remission of cancer, which are unpredictable as far as we know medically. Now, of course, we know there's some relationship between cancer and a kind of mental state where one (Page 70) has difficulty in assimilating and digesting a situation psychologically. It's a blockage, like for example the pancreas blocks and cannot take in any more food, or process protein. At the Menninger Institute, cancer patients were subjected to a process. They were asked to visualize the macrophages in the immune system, to imagine they were eating, absorbing the malignant cells; then to imagine them being drained, that the immune system acts as a kind of drain -- imagine a bathroom, for example. They had a few extraordinary cases of remission of cancer, just by these visualizations, but there are cases which were complicated because there was medical intervention. This is a method which I hope will be carried further in the future. It is very well possible that what the healer is doing is giving the person a kind of injection of energy. There may be several aspects of this energy. In laboratory experiments with healers, it was found the hands of one healer in particular, who was very successful in healing, would change the color of a chemical, and also the surface tension of water for example, which a magnetic field could do. There are certain processes which were altered by the laying of hands of that healer on the water. That was a laboratory experiment.

HIMAYAT: Even at a distance.

PIR: That's what I was going to say. One could have thought, "You might just as well use a magnet," but it happened at a distance, so it couldn't be accounted for by the electromagnetic field. There are other life fields, and those are the fields we are using in our healing. I'll tell you another story. Swami Rama, who died some time ago, was very ill at one point. He told me a very heavy candelabra had fallen on his head, and as a consequence he was bleeding all over the place, rather like that Jain teacher. He went to the doctor. Nobody could heal him, so he went to see his guru. He was formed in a very strict discipline of yoga -- like those rishis sitting in the caves. The sannyasins go through a very strict discipline, exposing themselves to heat, and cold, and rain, and storm, and dangerous animals, and all kinds of things, and they develop a kind of power. His guru said, "The law is that one of us has to die, and since you are more important for the world than I, I'll die so you can live." Truly enough he was healed, and his guru died. That's a story I heard from the lips of Swami Rama. I hope that our healers don't die in order to heal.

HIMAYAT: Or our gurus. I have a question for you, Pir Vilayat. When Murshid was alive, he foretold a bit of the future in a little paper called The New Era. In that there is a section where he says the day will come when medicine will take the place of surgery, and another day will come when healing will take the place of medicine. 

PIR: I don't know whether the doctors will be glad to hear that.

HIMAYAT: Some of them are quite excited. We did those conferences you came to in '81, and '82, and compared notes between the researchers and the clinicians (Page 71) and the spiritual teachers. That was a long time ago. The conferences were called Healing In Our Time. We wanted to see exactly what kind of progress had been made since the time Murshid had said that. What became obvious, in fact, is medicine has taken the place of many things that would have once been surgical procedures, to the point where many people didn't have to go to the hospital for things they would have had to have been hospitalized for a week or two; they'd just go out for a day or a few hours. Also the realm of mind/body medicine is starting to move into that realm of healing. It's become a very exciting part of conventional medicine. Dr. Becker brought in his electrical gate theory, and there was also a Chinese biophysicist who tested healers, and found their energy was picked up by electro--sensitive diodes from a distance. People are actually recognizing at some level, even in conventional medicine, some of the subtler realms and their impact -- their very powerful and harmonious impact -- on the healing function in a way that maybe is less invasive than medicine or surgery. 

PIR: I would have said supplementary rather than "taking the place of." Medicine has gone ahead tremendously in enormous strides, and continues to do so. There's a problem medicine has to meet: if you intervene with a medicine, a foreign agent in the body, you are interfering with the body's ability to self-organize, to heal itself and self-organize itself, which in an emergency is the only route you have. The consequence is the body says, "OK, you can do it. I won't do it anymore." There are times when we realize in an emergency there has to be a rather drastic intervention, because the body is not able to cope with the search for whatever it is, an infection or whatever, so how we allow the body to play its part -- by strengthening the immune system -- is of course a problem. I would say one of the great concerns of medical researchers is the way vaccines help the immune system to counter an infection, so the body supplies its own counter to the infection. 

I'll tell you a case. I know of a Catholic priest in Germany, a chiropractor who was relieved of his functions as a priest because he was what they call a naturopath. It occurred to him that people in a glass factory never developed cancer, and he thought, "Maybe the body is absorbing a lot of powdered glass and the immune system is activated because it thinks those are viruses, so one is strengthening the immune system." Then he did what I think was very heroic. He injected his arm with cancer cells, and he kept on injecting that cancer, sarcoma, with powdered glass. It got smaller. Then he thought, "If it heals totally, then I don't have a proof anymore," so he let it go again and kept it at bay. I think that's very heroic, but it's not demonstrative, because the causes of cancer are much deeper than our injecting and encapsulating it here in the body. It doesn't involve the whole person, so it's not really a method that can be used for healing cancer. He thought it was and there are even doctors in Mexico who were following his method, and I think they found it really didn't work. All I'm saying is you can see the importance of strengthening the immune system, and since the immune system is so deeply linked with our psychological attunement, (Page 72) you can see that working at the psychological level has a definite effect upon the condition of the physical body. It's not demonstrative because the causes of cancer are much deeper than simply injecting it. 

HIMAYAT: I felt Murshid was alluding to something like the unfoldment of the consciousness of humanity, that somehow the healing faculty is latent within and reflected within the consciousness of the awakening of humanity to the sacred within us all; that somehow, as the consciousness of humanity awakened more and more, the healing faculty would be more and more available; the healing function would be more and more available to all of humanity. In fact, we have seen evidence that the consciousness of humanity, particularly in and around the healing arts, has unfolded more and more during the last 90 years, and it has moved more and more into this manifestation of psyche and soma and then mind/body and even a deep appreciation for the sacred. 

PIR: Listening to you, I think of a statement by Dr. David Bohm, a physicist who worked with Einstein on relativity, and then developed his own theory. He showed that one can neutralize the electromagnetic field in an area, and if you do, you discover a force subliminal to the electromagnetic field. I'm saying there are levels of energy that have been identified, and there are many more. He said, "Be not surprised if a change of significance" (that means seeing things differently from what one had seen before) "will change the circuits in the brain." I would say not only the circuits in the brain but the whole hormonal endocrine system, maybe the immune system, the whole thing. He did not say this publicly, but I asked him what he thought might be the effect of heavy metal upon not just the psyche but the brain, and he said it's very damaging to the brain. There is a relationship between thought and the circuitry of the brain -- the neurotransmittors -- and the whole body. 

We had invited Dr. Becker to that conference. He did a lot of research, starting with salamanders. If you cut off the leg of a salamander it will grow again, or the tail, while if you amputate the leg of a rat it won't grow again. He wondered why. He experimented with an electromagnetic field, put a coil around the stump of a rat, and he found that the rat grew a leg. Perhaps not as good as the others, but it grew a leg. He came to the conclusion that behind the structuring of the configuration of the cells of the body is a template, and that template is an actual magnetic field. One of his successors found the effectiveness of that electromagnetic field varied from organ to organ, depending upon the frequency of the field. His successor made a catalogue of the frequencies that were appropriate for some of the organs of the body. That is very interesting for us, because we see there is some connection between music and the body, and the mantram for example -- the effect of the repetition of the wazaif if we are saying them aloud. Just imagine we are bombarding our solar plexus or our heart which is, of course, made of cells, by a sound. What happens if we place a tray of sand on the table and subject it to vibration, then alter the vibrations? The surface of the sand is (Page 73) going to represent, yes, it's going to display the way the vibration alters. It's going to be an image of that vibration; it's translating the vibration into an image, into a form. 

Now, another story, of a man called Tomatis, a physiologist who was experimenting with the effect of music on people. In a monastery they used to chant four hours a day. The new abbot thought, "what a waste of time. It would be much better if they would just chant for one hour. What's the point of chanting four hours? One hour, and they could gain time to do some of the nitty gritty work." The monks became more and more lethargic, and the less they chanted the more lethargic they became, and they couldn't do that nitty gritty work better just because they had more hours. The Abbot thought, "they are vegetarians. Maybe they should have a little more meat. " After eating a lot of meat, they became even more lethargic. Then Tomatis came in and said, "Well, let's make an experiment. Let's try to increase the amount of hours of chanting to say, two hours and then three hours, and see what it does." Lo and behold, they became more and more energetic. Thus he was able to demonstrate the effect of music upon the human body. Then he made a pair of experiments to determine exactly how many units of sound the consciousness of the human being requires to stay awake. If you don't have that amount of sound keeping you awake, you go into a comatic state; it's not only the importance of sound but the importance of which sound. 

HIMAYAT: Do you know there have even been studies, double blind studies, on the effect of prayer and the very positive direct correlation between that and healing. Just prayer. Could you say something about that?

PIR: Yes, it is the concept of God that makes prayer. We take for granted there is such a thing as God. We don't know what God is, so the only recourse we have is to imagine what God could be. We can only project into our image of God the qualities that are already in us, but a superlative of these qualities. He/She is most powerful, and most compassionate, most fruitful, and so on. Superlative. As a consequence, one is arousing latent qualities that are dormant in ourselves. However, I think there is more to it than that. We are arousing our enthusiasm, which is an energy, and it must have a consequence in terms of our body, since there is that mind/body connection. Our exaltation, which is energy, works in the body itself. There's nothing more pertinent than being without any kind of motivation in our life. The consequence, if we have no metabolation, is the body begins to deteriorate. It all starts with what I call being bemused, or bewondered. Actually, it's a word used by the Sufis: bewondering. I don't want to say anything that doesn't correspond to real experience. I don't want to make assumptions, so I have to be very cautious in how I speak. Therefore I am always trying to find a more concrete example to exemplify what I'm saying. Recently physicists, who used to be amazed by the extraordinary intelligence with which matter is programmed, have begun to say, "I never cease to be amazed by the elegance." (Page 74) Elegance, instead of just the extraordinary intelligence of the programming. The word 'elegance' has some sthetic sense, so it is our sensitivity to beauty that will enlist our ecstasy and will eventually have some bearing upon our problem, our body. 

We need to get our bodies activated. An expression of that is dancing. There are a lot of studies with mentally pathological cases where dance has helped them get back into sync again. I think of our Sufi dancing. It has a much more healing effect than we thought at first. Jelaluddin Rumi said, "It is God dancing around Himself." He had a sense of the choreography of the heavens. I find the most wonderful dancing is the whirling, the dervish whirling. 

HIMAYAT: Pir Vilayat, you've moved into an area that's really interesting to me, and I wonder if you could say a little bit more about the contribution Sufism has brought to the healing arena?

PIR: If you look into the wazaif, there are four wazaif used by the healers -- and they are not just words. They represent a whole attunement, a whole way of looking at things. First of all, there is Mu'id: ya Mu'id -- restoring. I think that's what we mean by therapy, bringing things back to the way they were before. That is maybe the objective of the doctor, to cure a person; if there is an infection, for example, to bring the body back to the way it was before that infection. It's particularly pertinent in psychotherapy. Therapy means bringing the patient back to where he/she was before that tribulation. 

When I was studying mental pathology as part of my diploma for psychology at Paris University in 1936, I remember writing a thesis for my diploma on psychophysiology. Part of the study was going to a mental institution every week. The patients used to come forward, and the professor used to interrogate them before all the students. There was a patient called Laura who said, "The doctor has no idea where I'm at, because he only knows where he is, and he is trying to bring me back to where he is -- which is where I was before -- but I can't come back by the same door from which I came out. I can only come out from where I am through another door." 

The thought of restoring health to the way it was before is limited, whereas a more effective way would be to turn the tables on the illness and use the illness in order to be better than one was before. 

HIMAYAT: This is like Prigogine's theory of becoming.

PIR: Exactly.

HIMAYAT: What wazifa is that, bringing through that new ecology of being? 
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PIR: It's Muhyi. For example, that's the name of Ibn' Arabi, Muhayaddin Ibn' Arabi. In psychology we would imagine how we could be if we would be what we might be, but at the level of the body, the body not only has an ability to self-organize itself if we don't intervene, but it has the ability to mutate. That means to improve itself. Muhyi is often translated by the English word 'regeneration.' I don't know whether that's the appropriate word.

HIMAYAT: Creativity.

PIR: Revivify. Something like that. Creativity is not being conditioned by the past, and that's Prigogine's theory, to overcome determinism as they call it in science.

HIMAYAT: This leads us to Murshid saying, "This is not my body, this is the temple of God." 

PIR: Yes. That's because one is struck by this thought. "This is my body." The beauty of the Dhikr, of course, is to create a temple out of our body. There are faculties in our body, for example, the magnetic field, but there are other faculties that will constitute what he calls a temple.

HIMAYAT: So the healing work really takes us right into the center of the esoteric work. That's the Sufi contribution to the healing -- it brings through not just restoration but actual transformation of being. 

PIR: Of energy, actually. 

HIMAYAT: Consciousness.

PIR: As the result of consciousness also. It's all related. There are another two wazaif. One is ya Hayy, which is, as you know, the American word of greeting -- 'Hi.' There is no entomological connection as far as I know, but an extraordinary concurrence. When you say "Hi!" you are communicating energy. Hayy! In India or the Middle East, there are men pulling a barge on the canal, saying Hayy! Hayy! Hayy! Hayy! They are generating enormous energy just by saying that word. Hayy is the energy we absorb from the environment, whereas Muhyi is energy we arouse from inside. Remember the story of Puran. The king condemned his son to death. The policemen dithered. They just couldn't bring themselves to kill the prince, and he became a sannyasin or dervish, and he came back to the garden of the palace. From the moment he entered the garden of the palace, everything started to flourish. The flowers began to grow, and so on, like the opera of Handel where he says, "Wherever you go the blushing flowers shall rise and all things flourish; and all things flourish where'ere you turn your eyes, where'ere you turn your eyes, where ever you turn your eyes." That's the story. That's the kind of feeling you have if you go to the grocery store and a man is (Page 76) very surly. You smile, and he grunts, and you don't let yourself be put off by that. You keep on thinking, well, I'm giving energy. I'm giving energy. Lo and behold, after many months he starts smiling back at you. It's really working -- being conscious of giving wherever you go. That's Hayy. 

The fourth is Quddus, which is the quickening of the Holy Spirit. It's a very different kind of energy than you get in a store, or even than you can get from inside yourself. Just repeating the word won't do it for you, but if you think, for example, you are a temple, and at the top of the temple there is an opening, and there is energy descending in the temple like the dove descending on the altar, that would illustrate what is meant by the quickening of the Holy Spirit. That's Quddus, ya Quddus.

