115 - What is the Universel?

Awakening in Life

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

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

I hear a call from the Earth - the message answers the call by the voice of the heart.    

Paraphrasing Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

I wish to know what is your suffering.   

Pasteur

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  The Alchemy of Happiness

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

Indifference gives great power; but the whole manifestation is a phenomenon of interest.   

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

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

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

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

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

Spiritual attainment is to be reached by the raising of the consciousness from limitation to perfection. We occupy as much horizon as is within our consciousness. Then a person does not see every condition as it appears to be, but sees behind every condition its deeper meaning.   

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan,  The Alchemy of Happiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Message is the awakening of the consciousness of humanity to the divinity of man.  

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

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

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

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

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
