122 - Prayer: the key to personal creativity

CURRICULUM OF THE SUFI ORDER
The teaching of Hazrat Inayat Khan
Presented and paraphrased by Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
Including parallels with the ancient Sufis.

Allah al Makhluk fi'l itikadat

Through your prayers,
God creates Himself through you.

(Hadith)

Make God a reality so that
He is no more imagination.

(Hazrat Inayat Khan)

We are moved by our spontaneous urge to pray. When facing the meaningfulness of our life and the significance of life in the universe, we are suddenly overwhelmed and humbled by a sense of awe and reverence, confronting the vastness and splendor of the reality beyond our grasp.

This is the way in which an unanticipated hunch that there is meaningfulness and splendor behind our limited understanding and emotion frees us from our limited outlook, and particularly from the inadequacy of our self-image - precisely that which has been hampering the unfoldment of our being and the fulfillment of our life's purpose - and fosters our personal creativity and accomplishment in life.

The purpose of life is that we grow towards perfection; from the greatest limitation we grow towards perfection(Alchemy of Happiness).

Can a limited man be conscious of perfection? The answer is that the limited man has limited himself; he is limited because he is conscious of his limitation. It is not his true self which is limited; what is limited is what he holds, not himself (Alchemy of Happiness: Attainment).

When one is conscious of limitation, one is limited; when one is conscious of per-fection, one is perfect. The thought of one's limitation covers what is true in one's being, one's true self (Religious Ideals: Purity).

Even in its limitation the soul has the spark of perfection. The real self can rise to perfection; the false self ends in limitation.(Alchemy: struggle).

To pray, we try to imagine God by projecting upon Him/Her qualities that we only know in their imperfect actualization in ourselves or others, by imagining them as they might be in their perfection. Our minds are equipped with the ability to represent a quality (or an outreach of space or span of time) always more infinite or excellent than those reached so far - in infinite regress. Of course we can never imagine them in their perfection.

Everything in the world that has a name is imaginable; the one and only Being the imagination cannot reach is God. And yet as God is manifested in all things and in all beings, so in all things and in all beings there is always a part which is unimaginable.....Man can reach God only as far as his imagination can take him. (Social Gathekas)

Ibn 'Arabi says:

To Him we attribute no quality without ourselves having that quality (1975 p. 16). Since the ephemeral manifests the eternal, it is by the ephemeral that God reveals to us the eternal. Know that there is no form in the lower world without a likeness (mithal) in the higher world. Between the two worlds there are tenuities which extend from each to its likeness. (Fut. lll 260, 6, Chittick, 1989 p. 406)

However, the Sufis always see things from two antipodal points of view: the Divine and the human:

However, the ephemeral is not conceivable as such that is its ephemeral and relative nature, except in relation to a principle from which it derives its possibility, so that it has no being in itself, but derives it from another to whom it is tied by its dependence (1975 p. 15). Man is incapable of appropriating the Divine knowledge which is applied to those archetypes in their state of non-existence...however the essence only reveals itself in the form of the disposition of the individual who receives this revelation.Ibn 'Arabi (p. 23)

How then can we grasp the eternal model of our personality?

God brings them out of the treasuries that is from an existence we do not perceive, to an existence that we do perceive. Hence the treasuries contains only the possibilities of the things (Fut. III 199, 3). When meanings are embodied and become manifest in shapes and measures they assume forms, since witnessing takes place through sight.Ibn 'Arabi (Chittick, 1989, p. 354).

Our active imagination is a moment, an instant, of the Divine Imagination that is the universe.Jili (Corbin, 1970, p. 214)

In our prayer, our faculty of creative imagination leads us from stretching our minds beyond their commonplace reach to actually being transformed ourselves.

Since imagination can produce beauty outwardly in the form of poetry, music, art, or literature, it can produce beauty of much higher and greater value when it is directed inward (Initiation)...

If you have no God, make one. By making God great, we ourselves arrive at a certain greatness. Imagination becomes a ladder on the path of the mystic. The mystic begins his work with the ladder of imagination, and actual experience follows (Philosophy, Psychology and Mysticism).

He is not wrong who makes God in his imagination, for by that imagination he is drawn nearer and nearer every moment of his life to that Divine Ideal which is the seeking of his soul. And, once he has touched Divine Perfection, in it he will find the fulfillment of his life. (Sangathas)

Thus prayer avers itself to be the secret of personal creativity, whereas trying to perfect ourselves while limiting ourselves in our personal self-image would be like trying to lift oneself by one's boot-straps.

He realizes that all that is lacking in it and all that remains to be done, or all the faults that it may seem to have, are his own faults, while his ideal is perfect. This is a stepping-stone for the mystic to come closer to God's shrine; by this he attains more quickly to a higher degree of perfection(Philosophy: Mysticism in Life).

By so doing, the faithful arouse qualities dormant within themselves.

The best way of losing the self is by the repetition of a certain sacred word which gradually makes one lose the conception of the false self, expressing at the same time the idea of the real self.

The difficulty lies in reconciling our normally limited self-image with the transpersonal dimension of our being. This is the key to understanding Hazrat Inayat Khan and all Sufism: accounting for both dimensions of our being rather than considering God as "other".

Divinity is human perfection and humanity is Divine limitation. (Gayan, Boulas)

Man is Divine limitation and God is human perfection. (Hazrat Inayat Khan)

By contemplating Him, I am contemplating myself; and by contemplating myself, I am contemplating Him. (Ibn 'Arabi)

I searched for God and I found myself, and I searched for myself and I found God. (Abdullah Ansari)

However, know whereby you are God and whereby you are not God. (Ibn 'Arabi)

All is God, but man has a mind of his own. We are a condition of God. (Hazrat Inayat Khan)

To spark creativity, we need to match the idiosyncrasies in our personality with the archetype that represents the higher dimension of our being, which is co-extensive with all beings, and we call God, while both poles of our being are incommensurable. This is not easy.

It is not an easy thing to make a God of imagination and make out of Him a reality. For every person it is like making an idol, a statue, and trying to make the statue live. But if ever anyone has reached God, he has not reached by finding God in the abstract, something where nothing is to be found. But he had to make God, and then through that God, which was once made, that God of abstract became knowable. (Hazrat Inayat Khan)

He brings them out of the treasuries that is from an existence that we do not perceive, to an existence that we do perceive. Hence the treasuries contain only the possibilities of the things.(Fut. lll 199, 3)

By imagining God as the paramount reality of our own being, our ideal becomes

homonized (made human - a word of Teilhard de Chardin) in the features of our personality. Through our prayers God becomes a personality.

It would be a mistake to limit God to being a personality, but it would be a greater mistake to deny the personality of God...(1979, p. 96).

Though the seed does not show the flower in it, yet the seed culminates in the flower. And therefore the flower already existed in the seed (ibid.).

Moreover, as the seed comes last after the life of the trunk, branch, flower and fruit, and sufficient in itself of producing another plant, so in man, the product of all the planes, spiritual and material shines forth that which caused the whole: the seed of existence: primal intelligence ...Man in the flowering of his personality, expresses the personality of God (ibid. p 76).

One sees one's personality as an exemplar of the Divine nature:

Then comes another unveiling in which your forms in Him will be manifest in you. Among us are those who know that his knowledge takes place in God

Ibn 'Arabi: (Chittick 1989 p. 298).

The Islamic prayer is a dialogue between the two poles of one's being: between the supplicant in his/her personal identity and the supplicant trying to see him/herself as seen from the antipodal vantage point (considered to be the Divine view) as he/she imagines God seeing Him/Herself in him/herself.

The knowledge you may glean by grasping in yourself the Divine archetype of which you are an exemplar is only the first degree of a Sufi, the second is knowing oneself through the knowledge that God has of himself through you (Ibn 'Arabi).

The purpose of the whole creation is the realization that God Himself gains by discovering His own perfection through his manifestation. The experience of every soul becomes the experience of the Divine Mind, (Unity of Religious Ideals) Not knowing that God experiences this life through us, one is seeking for Him somewhere else...Man realizes his perfection in God and God realizes His perfection in man. God discovers His perfection in our imperfection. (Hazrat Inayat Khan).

A Hadith of Prophet Mohammed often quoted declares: (God speaking)

I was a hidden treasure and loved to be known and therefore I created the world in order to know myself.

Or was it out of love for the possibility of us that God is seeking to become a reality as us?

A further Hadith says:

But for thee, I would not have created the heavens.

In consequence God becomes real:

But if this imagination is to become a reality, then exactly as one feels for one's earthly beloved sympathy, love and attachment, so one must feel the same for God (Social Gathekas).

One communicates with God, so that God becomes to the initiate a living entity; God is then no longer an ideal or an imagination, no longer one whom he has made; the One whom he once made has now become alive - a living God. Before this there was belief in God, there was worship of Him; perhaps He was made in the imagination; but in this stage God becomes living. And what a phenomenon this is! This stage is a miracle in itself. The God-realized person need not speak of or discuss the name of God; his presence will inspire the sense of God in every being, and charge the atmosphere with it. Everyone that meets him, whether he is spiritual or moral or religious or without religion, will feel God in some form or other(The Path of Initiation).

Thus prayer transmutes one's self image - the false ego - into one's true self and thus avers itself to be the ultimate personal creativity.

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.

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.

In that state, called Fana-fi-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-Fan, where the false ego is annihilated and merged into the true personality, which is really God expressing Himself in some wondrous ways. When 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 (Hazrat Inayat Khan).
