26 - The Hierarchy

All surrender to love willingly and to power unwillingly.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

When we talk about the hierarchy. we are thinking of beings like Saint Francis or Buddha or Akhnaton - the numbers are Infinite - beings held in esteem not only by their followers, but people at large throughout the centuries. Great beings are held in esteem, not because of their position or office in a government of the world, imagined by some on the model of our secular governments with all the bureaucracy and ego squabbles for power, but by the evidence of their selfless love and dedication to their fellow beings, and by their abdication from any claim to a position or use of personal power.

Most people find it difficult to handle power.

No sooner does one build an institution, than people are called to positions in which they are subjected to the temptation of exercising personal power, influencing other people, enforcing the will by dint of their official position. What follows are intrigues, quarrels, unkindness, backbiting, all the kind of things one finds in spiritual groups. just as one does in the rather selfish society we are living in. Great beings are people who have abandoned the values of the world, and because of that, deal with worldly problems in a different way, a subtle way.

For example, when Buddha, on his tour of Indian cities, visited Kapilavatsu (his native town of which he was the crown prince) his father, the king, sent a pompous procession to greet him. Avoiding this worldly recognition, Buddha was found with a group of monks begging in the back streets of the city. St. Vincent de Paul did the same when the President of the French Republic came to honor him. Gandhi refused the post of First President of the Indian Republic. Akhnaton relinquished many of the artifices of the pharaonic tradition. St. Francis abandoned the riches of his ancestral inheritance and so did Saint Clare, who walked bare-footed in the streets, in rags, and catered to the lepers.

This is what Murshid means by the aristocracy of the soul and the democracy of the ego. "The Murshid is there for the mureed", he says. He or she is there by the esteem in which he/she is held by virtue of his/her realization, mastery, self-sacrifice, dedication, service, radiance, sacredness, not by virtue of a post or office in the hierarchy. One is only able to take that post when one does not wish for it. And then, for having lost one's ego, the divine power of love takes over from the despotism of the autocrats (which is so devastating to those who are struggling for self-esteem and lose self confidence by being undermined by people who purport to be superior).

No claim to superiority, such is the message of Islam marking the advent of democracy. But here comes the grind: the challenge comes if, when occupying the post to preserve it from the despots while upholding its sacredness, when striving to live up to the divine status present in each of us (while keeping the human touch) one is able to love those who envy one or denigrate one or try to foul one, and one can accept the responsibility while unmasking the sham of the adulation and deference to the outer position. This is the aristocracy of the soul together with the democracy of the ego.
